AI Browser? No Thanks

I've been using the Arc browser for the better part of two years now. Mostly because I liked the interface and the ability to make "spaces." It's my personal daily driver for surfing the web. But it was off-putting when The Browser Company announced their "Arc Search" feature that would produce its own AI (haha) generated page to summarize the results. A "search engine that searched for you."

And now TBC announces they'll stop supporting/maintaining Arc to pivot to Dia, an AI-based browser.

Manu sums it up well:

"But more importantly, there’s something else about this whole idea of chatting-with-a-computer-to-get-answers-from-the-web that I find incredibly off-putting: the complete lack of potential for serendipity."

Maybe I'm just not reading the signs. Maybe the CEOs and big companies know better than I do what will work in the market. But whatever this AI-based web hellscape they want is, I'm really not interested in it. The web is for discovery. When all of the weirdness of the internet is wrapped up behind an LLM, it gets dumbed down to the most average, least interesting version of whatever it was in its original form.

Lame.

Tagged: AI, technology,