DIA the Browser
Long Story:
Web browsers are in fact very very interesting. As a web developer, I look at them about 60% of my time at the computer. Naturally I know a lot about them and I find them fascinating. As a piece of technology these are very very interesting.
Here's proof! ⬇️
Besides consuming all your RAM 🥁 and making your computer slow 🦥, browsers are your access point into the entire world 🌎. It is a unique mechanism, as a web developer, I know how to feed the browser some information, that it will interpret and make something look cool, and on the other end, you as a visitor will see a cool thing done that was imagined by me, but made real by a browser. It is a marvelous piece of tech. It knows what to do, when you type an address in the address bar, and it also knows you.
It knows your incognito shady things, it knows your official and unofficial language, it knows your personal interests, it knows everything about you. Or at least 60% 😅
If you’ve never heard about Arc, don’t worry, this is a pretty new browser built by a company named The Browser Company, this company came with a mission to change the way we treat a browser, since it wasn’t different in a long time. Now I’ve tried it, and I wasn’t 100% sure about it. So I’ve left it to cook a bit more, and then later give it another chance maybe.
Well this company announced their new browser, Dia. What they’re trying to do is take everything that a browser knows about you, put it into the hands of AI, and make that AI do most of the things for you. ✨
It sounds scary and utopic at the same time.
Let me go through the current draft functionalities that they presented in the video.
- From a note to gmail
Assuming that you’re writing some text in some file and you have a few people mentioned there, you can simply right click, and ask the AI to send emails to all the people from the list. And the AI will open a new tab, go to gmail.com or whatever email you’re using, and compose different emails for each of the people in the list. Cool! 😎 - Text Continuation
Basically the same that you have now with chat interfaces, but instead of giving instruction it’s at your right click, no prompts, no nothing, it knows where you right click is, it knows what you want to know, it knows everything about you, it knows you don’t want a wall of text just a quick sample! 😎 - Tab Awareness
Another cool thing is that it knows what tabs you have open, it’s in the browser duh 😀, so now you can ask it to gather information about open pages, like urls, and information from those pages. Imagine you’re writing a paper and you have 50 tabs open, you can just ask it to include it in the references and it will do that for you Cool 😎 - History browser
Basically now you can ask it to find a tab that you’ve had open and closed by accident 5 days ago, and totally forgot about it. It’s really Cool 😎
These 4 little demos already show, and incredible potential. The browsers that are about to come are not only cool, and interesting but are going to make your way of using the internet so much more different!
Now for the less cool parts. The Browser Company is not an AI company, so they don’t own and develop their own AI Model, yet. Likely they will resort to one of the big players out there. So that means that they might require to send data out there to the server and then get it back.
Personally I am not a fan of this, because it means I share all our private incognito data to everybody out there. I mean google owns me and my data, as I use most google products, but at least this is a giant that has very tight control over who can access and to whom it wants to sell it 💸.
On the other hand, if the browser comes with a built-in (local) model that won’t send data to anybody, it is going to be fantastic. Because all your data is just yours, nobody can even take a peek at it, I mean the performance, or accuracy might not be that good, but if the model is trained for a specific list of activities this could be equal or better than a general language model.
Only time will tell what is going to result from all of this, I’m personally very excited, because it’s a tool that challenges the big players, and is yet another company that tries to take a big chunk of Google’s Pie, alongside OpenAI and Microsoft. For Google that’s bad news, for us consumers it’s great, because we benefit from market competition.
AI Browser, that sounds like tomorrow, but it’s actually today! We live and enjoy the future!
