The Atlas implementation isn't great, but I'll pick something that tries to represent my interests every time. The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance. Users need something working on their behalf to mine through the garbage to pull out the useful bits. An AI browser is the next logical step after uBlock.
The next logical step after Ublock is to have a succession structure in place if Raymond Hill or the maintainers of the various blocklists it's based on, decide they don't want to work on it anymore.
This and the new device that OpenAI is working on is more of a general strategy to make a bigger moat by having more of an ecosystem so that people will keep their subscriptions and also get pro.
OpenAI should be 100% required to rev share with content creators (just like radio stations pay via compulsory licenses for the music they play), but this is a weird complaint:
> “sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box”
If a human wrote that same article about Taylor Swift, would you say it completely fabricates content? Most “articles” on the web are just rewrites of someone else’s articles anyway and nobody goes after them as bad actors (they should).
It's really crazy that there is an entire ai generated internet. I have zero clue what the benefit of using this would be to me.Even if we argue that it is less ads and such, that would only be until they garner enough users to start pushing charges. Probably through even more obtrusive ads.
I also need to laugh. Wasn't open AI just crying about people copying them not so long ago?
> There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet.
This article is deep, important, and easily misinterpreted. The TL;DR is that a plausible business model for AI companies is centered around surveillance advertising and content gating like Google or Meta, but in a much more insidious and invasive form.
This thing is an absolute security nightmare. The concept of opening up the full context of your authenticated sessions in your email, financial, healthcare or other web sites to ChatGPT is downright reckless. Aside from personal harm, the way they are pushing this is going to cause large scale data breaches at companies that harbour sensitive information. I've been the one pushing against hard blocking AI tools at my org so far but this may have turned me around for OpenAI at least.
I normally dont waste a lot of energy on politics.
But this feels truly dystopian. We here on HN are all in our bubble, we know that AI responses are very prone to error and just great in mimicking. We can differentiate when to use and when not (more or less), but when I talk to non-tech people in a normal city not close to a tech hub, most of them treat ChatGPT as the all-knowing factual instance.
They have no idea of the concious and unconcious bias on the responses, based on how we ask the questions.
Unfortunately I think these are the majority of the people.
If you combine all that with a shady Silicon Valley CEO under historical pressure to make OpenAI profitable after 64 billion in funding, regularly flirting with the US president, it seems always consequential to me that exactly what the author described is the goal. No matter the cost.
As we all feel like AI progress is stagnating and mainly the production cost to get AI responses is going down, this almost seems like the only out for OpenAI to win.
The SV playbook is to create a product, make it indispensable and monopolise it. Microsoft did it with office software. Payment companies want to be monopolies. Social media are of course the ultimate monopolies - network effects mean there is only one winner.
So I guess the only logical next step for Big AI is to destroy the web, once they have squeezed every last bit out of it. Or at least make it dependent on them. Who needs news sites when OpenAI can do it? Why blog - just prompt your BlogLLM with an idea. Why comment on blogs - your agent will do it for you. All while avoid child porn with 97% accuracy - somerhing human curated content surely cannot be trusted to do.
This is amazing. My entire web browser session state for every private and personal website I sign onto every day will be used for training data. It's great! I love this. This is exactly the direction humans should be going in to not self-destruct. The future is looking bright, while the light in our brains dims to eventual darkness. Slowly. Tragically. And for what purpose exactly. So cool.
I recommend BrowserOS if you're looking for alternatives.
Open-source agentic browser that uses any LLM provider (including local / Ollama).
That being said... I tried it, and while it was fun and cool, I didn't get enough value out of it to use it regularly (I think this would go for any agentic browser).
In all seriousness yes. Except maybe for the last 5 sentences.
I fail to see the issue people have here. I mean, what exactly is the problem with training data here? This is not like advertising, where the data is used against you. It's not information about people that's being collected and extracted here - it's about collecting enough signal to identify patterns of thinking; it's about how human minds in general perceive the world. This is not going to hurt you.
(LLMs ultimately might, when wielded by... the same parties that have been screwing you over for decades or more. It's not OpenAI that's screwing you over here - it's advertisers, marketers, news publishers, and others in the good ol' cohort of exploitative liars.)
Wow! Amazing post! You really nailed the complexities of AI browsers in ways that most people don't think about. I think there's also a doom paradox where if more people search with AI, this disincentives people from posting on their own blog and websites where incentives are usually ads could help support them. If AI is crawling and then spitting back information from your blog (you get no revenue), is there a point to post at all?
Every professional involved in saas, web , online content creation thinks the web is a beautiful thing.
In reality the fact of social media means web failed long time ago, and it only serves a void not taken by mobile apps , and now llm agents.
Why do I need to read everything about tailor Swift on you her web site , if I don’t know a single song of her ? ( I actually do ) .
I don’t want a screaming website tells me about her best new album ever , and her tours if LLM knows I don’t like pop music . The other way around if you like her you’d like a different set of information. Website can do that for you
Atlas confuses me. Firefox already puts Claude or ChatGPT in my sidebar and has integrations so I can have it analyze or summarize content or help me with something on the page. Atlas looks like yet another Chromium fork that should have been a browser extension, not a revolutionary product that will secure OpenAI's market dominance.
I tested Google Search, Google Gemini and Claude with "Taylor Swift showgirl". Gemini and Claude gave me a description plus some links. Both were organized better than the Google search page. If I didn't like the description that Claude or Google gave me I could click on the Wikipedia link. Claude gave me a link to Spotify to listen while Gemini gave me a link to YouTube to watch and lisen.
The complaint about the OpenAI browser seems to be it didn't show any links. I agree, that is a big problem. If you are just getting error prone AI output then it's pretty worthless.
69 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 80.1 ms ] thread2 - we didn't leave command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago
> “sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box”
If a human wrote that same article about Taylor Swift, would you say it completely fabricates content? Most “articles” on the web are just rewrites of someone else’s articles anyway and nobody goes after them as bad actors (they should).
I also need to laugh. Wasn't open AI just crying about people copying them not so long ago?
2.0 - algorithmic feeds of real content with no outbound links - stay in the wall
3.0 - slop infects rankings and feeds, real content gets sublimated
4.0 - algorithmic feeds become only slop
5.0 - no more feeds or rankings, but on demand generative streams of slop within different walled slop gardens
6.0 - 4D slop that feeds itself, continuously turning in on itself and regenerating
:skull:
The article does taste a bit "conspiracy theory" for me though
Worth reading to the end.
No we didnt.
This thing is an absolute security nightmare. The concept of opening up the full context of your authenticated sessions in your email, financial, healthcare or other web sites to ChatGPT is downright reckless. Aside from personal harm, the way they are pushing this is going to cause large scale data breaches at companies that harbour sensitive information. I've been the one pushing against hard blocking AI tools at my org so far but this may have turned me around for OpenAI at least.
But this feels truly dystopian. We here on HN are all in our bubble, we know that AI responses are very prone to error and just great in mimicking. We can differentiate when to use and when not (more or less), but when I talk to non-tech people in a normal city not close to a tech hub, most of them treat ChatGPT as the all-knowing factual instance.
They have no idea of the concious and unconcious bias on the responses, based on how we ask the questions.
Unfortunately I think these are the majority of the people.
If you combine all that with a shady Silicon Valley CEO under historical pressure to make OpenAI profitable after 64 billion in funding, regularly flirting with the US president, it seems always consequential to me that exactly what the author described is the goal. No matter the cost.
As we all feel like AI progress is stagnating and mainly the production cost to get AI responses is going down, this almost seems like the only out for OpenAI to win.
So I guess the only logical next step for Big AI is to destroy the web, once they have squeezed every last bit out of it. Or at least make it dependent on them. Who needs news sites when OpenAI can do it? Why blog - just prompt your BlogLLM with an idea. Why comment on blogs - your agent will do it for you. All while avoid child porn with 97% accuracy - somerhing human curated content surely cannot be trusted to do.
So I am 0% surprised.
Open-source agentic browser that uses any LLM provider (including local / Ollama).
That being said... I tried it, and while it was fun and cool, I didn't get enough value out of it to use it regularly (I think this would go for any agentic browser).
I fail to see the issue people have here. I mean, what exactly is the problem with training data here? This is not like advertising, where the data is used against you. It's not information about people that's being collected and extracted here - it's about collecting enough signal to identify patterns of thinking; it's about how human minds in general perceive the world. This is not going to hurt you.
(LLMs ultimately might, when wielded by... the same parties that have been screwing you over for decades or more. It's not OpenAI that's screwing you over here - it's advertisers, marketers, news publishers, and others in the good ol' cohort of exploitative liars.)
In reality the fact of social media means web failed long time ago, and it only serves a void not taken by mobile apps , and now llm agents.
Why do I need to read everything about tailor Swift on you her web site , if I don’t know a single song of her ? ( I actually do ) .
I don’t want a screaming website tells me about her best new album ever , and her tours if LLM knows I don’t like pop music . The other way around if you like her you’d like a different set of information. Website can do that for you
They didn't even change the codename that's displayed in the Settings page.
The complaint about the OpenAI browser seems to be it didn't show any links. I agree, that is a big problem. If you are just getting error prone AI output then it's pretty worthless.