The A.I. Bubble Is Coming for Your Browser Artificial-intelligence startups, like the makers of the "smart" web browser Dia, are being acquired for vast sums. There's an old business maxim dating to the California gold rush: it's easier to make money selling picks and shovels to aspiring miners than to strike it rich finding gold. Artificial intelligence is in a picks-and-shovels phase right now. If gold, in this metaphor, is artificial general intelligence--a machine smarter than a human--or some version of a digital god, then tech companies are snapping up the tools to create one, including graphics-processing units, data centers, and trained A.I. models. That scramble is why Mark Zuckerberg is paying a twenty-four-year-old A.I. researcher two hundred and fifty million dollars to work at Meta, and why Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI, recently said that the company would spend "trillions of dollars" building infrastructure.

The Browser Company is best known for its Arc browser, which aims to both innovate and simplify, with a keen focus on usability. But they also have a second browser called Dia in the works, which is being built from the ground up with AI features--and that one seems to be their project of choice, as Arc is no longer in active development. To stoke those fires even further, The Browser Company launched a paid monthly subscription for Dia earlier this week, reports TechCrunch. With Dia Pro, users get two big benefits: first, unlimited access to the browser's AI chat feature, which can answer questions about the content of open tabs, and second, access to the browser's Skills feature, which are "shortcuts for repeatable workflows." The latter includes writing, planning, translating, shopping, learning, and more.

Back in 2022, The Browser Company released an innovative web browser called Arc that prioritized ease-of-use and user experience over all things. The simplified interface and feature set was good for niche users, but didn't offer enough pizzazz for advanced users. Now, the makers of Arc have unveiled the first taste of their next product, which happens to be yet another web browser -- except this one is an AI-powered "smart browser" called Dia. It's no secret that the world is moving towards an AI-driven future. "What we believe specifically is that AI will not exist as an app or a button, but AI will be a whole new environment built on top of a browser," said The Browser Company's CEO Josh Miller in a recruitment video on YouTube: In the video, the company shows off several prototype features in Dia.

Last week, The Browser Company, a startup that makes the Arc web browser, released a slick new iPhone app called Arc Search. Instead of displaying links, its brand new "Browse for Me" feature reads the first handful of pages and summarizes them into a single, custom-built, Arc-formatted web page using large language models from OpenAI and others. If a user does click through to any of the actual pages, Arc Search blocks ads, cookies and trackers by default. Arc's efforts to reimagine web browsing have received near-universal acclaim. But over the last few days, "Browse for Me" earned The Browser Company its first online backlash.

Earlier this week, the team behind the Arc browser for Mac (and recently Windows) released a brand-new iPhone app called Arc Search. As you might expect, it's infused with AI to power an experience where the app "browses for you"--pulling together a variety of sources of info across the internet to make a custom webpage to answer whatever questions you throw at it. That's just one part of what The Browser Company is calling Act 2 of Arc, and the company gave details on three other major new features its bringing to the browser over the coming weeks and months. The connective tissue of all these updates is that Arc is trying to blur the lines between a browser, search engine and website -- the company wants to combine them all to make the internet a bit more useful to end users. In a promo video released today, various people from The Browser Company excitedly discuss a browser that can browse for you (an admittedly handy idea). The Arc Search app showed off one implementation of that idea, and the next is a feature that arrives today called Instant Links.

Arc, a browser initially built just for the Mac, has been expanding lately. The Browser Company announced a beta of its Windows version last month, and today they're bringing the Arc experience to the iPhone with Arc Search. As the name implies, the new app is focused on searching -- when you open the app, you're met with a keyboard and search field, not your usual collection of tabs. And rather than just serving up simple search results from Google or your engine of choice, Arc scans the internet for various sources and creates a "page for me" that pulls together a bunch of info on your desired query. For example, I just searched for "What happened in the Detroit Lions game?" and was met with details about a controversial two-point conversion that was overturned and how it ultimately affected the game's outcome, which was a three-point Lions loss.

Josh Miller laughs a few minutes into our conversation and admits that he almost declined today's interview about the Browser Company. The young CEO is jetlagged from a flight to Paris but appears comfortable over Zoom and eager to talk about Arc, an alternative web browser with AI tools. "We weren't sure if we wanted more people to use it," says Miller. "It's legitimately a problem how [many] people are interested." He faces an enviable issue for a software leader.