I first browsed the web in the spring of 1996, at college, when small groups of us were allowed 30 minutes to “experience the internet”, courtesy of a desktop PC and a thick printed paper directory of “all of the world’s websites”. Being 16, we navigated immediately to “Bianca’s Smut Shack”.
Since then, the experience of browsing the web has remained largely the same: you type a URL or search query, you click, you read, you click some more… but that’s now set to change. The way in which we access digital information, the way we shop and plan and manage our lives via the web, is about to be disrupted thanks to artificial intelligence, and the impact is going to be… well, actually, like everything else to do with AI, no one actually knows.
Two of the biggest players in AI development, OpenAI and Perplexity, are working on new internet browsers which, they believe, will change the way we interact with the web for ever. Perplexity launched its Comet browser in a beta form in July. What, though, makes AI-enabled browsing different?
The short answer is “basically everything”. When you open a web browser now, you are required to undertake the onerous tasks of reading the words on each webpage, clicking relevant links yourself, accessing multiple websites to find and consolidate information, spend tedious minutes filling out forms or selecting from dropdown menus… but what if the machine could just do all that for you?
That’s the dream presented by OpenAI et al – that by putting AI into your browser, it changes the experience of using the internet from “tool we use” to “using AI to scan the digital world”. Why spend hours working out where to go on holiday, scouring websites for bargains and weeding out horror stories? When doing research, why waste time reading around a subject when you can just ask the AI to take a concept and expand it into a beginner’s tutorial simply by clicking a button?
This may sound fantastical, and to be clear, at present it still is; the technology is still prototypical and clunky and unlikely to convince you quite yet that it’s the future. But this technology is also the worst it’s ever going to be, and is improving by the day.
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Comet says it will enable users to ask questions, perform tasks, and conduct research in a single, unified interface. The browser integrates a built-in assistant that can compare products, summarise content, book meetings.
According to insiders, OpenAI’s planned browser will be “designed to keep some user interactions within a ChatGPT-like native chat interface instead of clicking through to websites”. The technology that’s being developed is intended to be nothing less than an everything machine, your only point of contact with the digital world.
You might be thinking that this could pose serious problems for certain types of business, and you would be right. The introduction of AI summaries to Google is said to have seen search traffic to websites fall by just under 50%. MailOnline reports Google traffic declining by two-thirds since the search giant introduced AI summaries of search results. The era of traffic-based ad income for publishers may be over. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
If search is dead as a traffic driver, so is “Search Engine Optimisation”. Journalism has been in something of a parlous state since the advent of the internet, and it doesn’t feel like this is going to do anything to arrest the decline in media revenues. All of the major AI businesses have made noises about introducing advertising to their models, to enable brands and businesses to pay to ensure their products are suggested to consumers by The Machine. But how will that affect smaller companies who can’t compete? How does the AI decide which sources to consult when searching for and summarising information? How will this affect diversity and plurality of thought? Again, nobody knows.
And in case you thought it’s just the AI companies peddling this, it’s the social media giants too. Meta continues to bet big on Smart Glasses as the future of personal computing and interface design, and the vehicle for Mark Zuckerberg’s vision of a personal AI assistant for everyone. Your glasses will act as your single, on-the-go portal to the web and all of the world’s information, powered by a voice-activated digital butler who will act on your behalf. As Zuck said last month: “I think in the future, if you don’t have AI glasses, you’re basically going to be at a cognitive disadvantage.”
As for the potential disadvantage that will be caused to the hundreds of millions of people whose livelihoods depend on the web, and the people who currently use it, that doesn’t seem to matter so much.
Matt Muir is a tech journalist
