Chatgpt Atlas

It's being downvoted due to the nonconstructive shitpost tone.

Good luck with that.

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/LICENS...

Then all the money would go to Ladybird.

can't wait for Servo being mainstreamed!

It says currently, so it wouldn't make sense to be WebKit.

I wish we would see more WebKit browsers just for more variety. I personally use Safari as my primary browser on my Mac.

Ora is interesting as it's an Arc-like spin using WebKit, but still early days for it.

Just seems like not a very smart long-term move to build on it.

Tough to get changes upstream when the majority of engineers working on Chromium are Google devs.

Lots of features you'd hope would be available in Chromium aren't there and have to be implemented manually, but then you need to keep your fork interoperating with a massive, moving target. Safe Browsing, Translate, Spellcheck, Autofill, Password Manager aren't available in Chromium and Google cut unauthorized Chromium browsers off from using Google Sync in 2021 (https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-cuts-off-other-chromium...)

There's probably more issues?

But I thought AI was supposed to be writing 90% of code by now, you're telling me building a new browser engine is still a multi-year, difficult effort?

They used Claude code to write it.

That's because it is.

Just do this on the navigation bar: atlas://extensions

Of course

I was sceptical as well before trying it out, but it is unfortunately very practical to ask the AI sidebar about an information-dense website or even github codebase (just as dev examples).

There were of course many browser extensions that did this beforehand (and even better, by hyper-linking the exact text passage of answer segments), but the main differentiator is that most people don't use them/know about them, and this comes with a big tech nametag and it is free.

Try it yourself and ignore the hype. For certain things it can be really useful, just keep in mind that it's early days.

I recently used Comet to find out of print movies that were never released on DVD/Bluray, then find them on ebay, then find the best value, then provide me with a list to order. It felt like magic watching it work, and saved me many hours of either doing it myself or scripting it.

I did have to repeatedly break it into ever smaller tasks to get everything to fit within the context windows, but still... it might have been janky but it was janky magic.

> Significant losses: Internal documents revealed that Amazon's devices division lost over $25 billion between 2017 and 2021. A separate report estimated the Alexa division alone lost around $10 billion in 2022.

I think this is the natural endpoint - local models doing something like what Atlas and Codex are doing, acting like a firewall between the user and web. You don't need to wade through the crap online yourself, the AI extracts the useful signal for you, acts like a memory layer for your values and preferences. Don't like the feed ranking - use your agent to extract, filter and rerank by your criteria. Not a big fan of dark UI patterns? Not a problem anymore, the UI can be regenerated. Need a stronger model? Sure, your agent can delegate.

I see this as a big unbundling, since your agent has your ear now, not Google, not social networks, they lose their entry point status and don't control by ranking, filtering and UI what I see or what I can do. They can spread out searches to specialized engines, replace Google for search, walk above all social networks and centralize your activities so you don't have to follow each one individually. A wrapper or cocoon for the user, taking the ad-block and anti-virus role, protecting your privacy and carefully reducing your exposure to information leaks.

All of this only works if you can host your model. But this is where the trend is going, we can already see decent small models, maybe before 2030 we will be running powerful local models on efficient local chips.

> the only thing they were good for was setting timers, controlling music playback, and gimmicky stuff like that.

That's _still_ the only thing they're good at...

I hate to tell you, but Siri and other voice assistance are not good at controlling music playback. I have been waiting for that specific feature to get “good” for over a decade now.

The closest one came to handling controlling music playback well in anyway was Cortana but even Cortana didn’t do the things that I needed to do with my voice while controlling music play.

The biggest Used case for me was always hey Cortana hey Siri add a specific song to now playing and play it next. No matter what on any operating system. The voice assistant delete the entire queue and then probably plays the wrong song. Not only will they play the wrong song, but they will play the entire album from the wrong song if it is available so now I’ve gone from a playlist that I was building and listening to on loop for potentially days to some album that I don’t wanna listen to because it could not just add a song next.

At what point does the gimmick become a product feature that people use and come to expect? I set alarms/timers and control music with Siri every day. Siri still sucks for more than that, and I wish it were good for more, but I really do like and use those features.

Curious as to what companies you think DO have a moat? I would say their moat is the same as Facebook's. Not permanent (see TikTok) but also super strong.

> There may be no moat for any of this.

It's what I was thinking looking at the launch video. Is there a moat? No, there is none. The LLM itself is fungible, what matters is the agentic and memory layer on top. That can be reconstructed easily. All you need to do is export your data from old providers to bootstrap your system in another place. I actually did that, exported from reddit, hn, youtube, chatgpt, claude and gemini - about 15 years worth of content, now sitting on my laptop in a RAG system.

At minimum all you need is a config file, like CLAUDE.md containing the absolute minimum information you need to set your preferences and values. That would be even more portable, you can simply paste text in any LLM to configure it before use. Exporting all your data is the maximalist take on the problem of managing your online identity.

Indeed the "no-moat" (weight exfiltration of any openly accessible model) is something that makes me optimistic. That, and the fact that most tasks have "capacity thresholds" which on-device models will increasingly be able to saturate. One example is SQL query generation from text (example: duckdb-text2sql https://motherduck.com/blog/duckdb-text2sql-llm/).

Who needs browsers at all? We have libraries and the Dewey Decimal system

Yeah, but if I could tell my web browser to read my comment history to figure out what I engage with on HN and to have it read HN for me and write comments for me then I would get all this time back and have more time to do chores around the house!

How is that different from Google Chrome? Not debating that it's scary to have all that context collected in one place, just saying it's already been status quo on the web for years.

> I want an AI browser that digs into webpages, finds the information I want and presents it to me in a single consistent and beautiful UI with all of the hazards removed.

The browser you're looking for already exists :) (partially) its called arc browser on mobile and specifically their browse for me feature

Hey, I like your thinking, I wrote about this a bit in another comment here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45663857

I share many of your ideas, and I think the best solution would be:

1. a pure data API web (like the original semantic-web idea)

2. open-source browsers which can query for information using on-device LLMs and display it to the user in any UI way they want.

I think 1. will happen, since all search engines will use AI results, with no click through to the original data-owner (website). So there is no more financial incentive to keep a UI website. The question is if the "data API web" will be decentralised or under the control of a few big players that already mined the web.

2. will hopefully happen if on-device models become more capable, the question is by then whether most people are already defaulted to AI browsers from big tech (since they have the money to burn-cash using cloud LLM services to capture market share before on-device LLMs are good enough). The only way to prevent this is user-education and mistrust verus Big Tech, which is what already befell Microsoft's Recall (besides a terrible security architecure).

> It's a no brainer. Google's hegemony is really going to take a hit

Wonder which company has the best in class browser today, along with a really really good model, an in-house chip, datacenter infra, and most importantly, is cash flow positive?

When ChatGPT was first released I quickly lost count of the number of HN comments predicting Google had about 6-12 months before their search monopoly and ad revenue evaporated.

I feel the same way.

Yet people are using AI for therapy, listening to AI-written novels read by AI, gladly watching AI-made slop. There seems to be real actual demand for it. Feels like total insanity to me; but here we are and facts are facts.

I guess whether the emperor is wearing clothes or not never actually mattered.

Can't be far off.

I'm on Macos and Chrome has a Gemini button that functions very similar to Grox on X.. It's useful and unobtrusive.

I also use Comet for specific financial research, also very useful.

I have edge with Copilot. Never use it. Microsoft is gross.

I have an invite to something called Strawberry but at this point, I'm tapped out. Sorry OpenAI, you're late to the game for me.

Maybe next week.

Yes, there is a on-device Gemini model for Chrome. (Chrome Built-in AI), they have been testing it for over a year (been participating) and there were hackathons around it (ongoing until Nov 1 https://googlechromeai2025.devpost.com).

In general, I like the idea, but I'm afraid the final implementation will still auto-decide between using the local (for cost saving) and cloud LLM. And potentially outsourcing all your browser-usage LLMs calls to Big Tech like Google is a no-go .

They already have Gemini for chrome which no one uses.

Gemini is already in Chrome. Atlas seems neat but it is not a unique product.

> If Atlas is successful, there's no reason why Google won't try to mimic it.

Regulation.

> all they'd have to do is put Gemini directly into Chrome

Google would never do that! /s

https://gemini.google/overview/gemini-in-chrome/

I assume they mean a web browser has root access to everything you do online, which is so far-reaching nowadays that it's not far from having root over your whole machine in terms of actual exposure.

Yes

You have a great business sense!

There is an open source alternative -- browserOS.com

Our trusted computing base should be small, built from open-source, and not under the control of one company.

But sadly, here we are.

How do we know GMail can't steal your bank account info and Chrome can't steal ... everything from your web browsing, or impersonate you?

All they have to do is be pressured by a government: https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Bills_Legislat...

> Browser memories let ChatGPT remember useful details from your web browsing to provide better responses and suggestions, while maintaining privacy and user control. Users can opt-in during setup or in Settings > Personalization > Reference browser memories.

> As you browse in Atlas, web content is summarized on our servers. We apply safety and sensitive data filters that are designed to keep out personally identifiable information (like government IDs, SSNs, bank account numbers, online credentials, account recovery content, and addresses), and private data like medical records and financial information. We block summaries altogether on certain sensitive websites (like adult sites).

So the actual content of every page you visit is sent to ChatGPT servers. That is WAY more invasive than anything Chrome does afaik.

I like how honest and blunt your comment is, and what it says about our current relationship with bigtech. Because what you say is accurate, people no longer see a problem in adopting technologies like OpenAI's Atlas. Google set a standard, and what used to be a massive red flag is now "a price we've already paid". No new harm is felt.

The problem with the apple approach is that it's fine grained and you have to restart apps for every change. I wouldn't care if nothing was allowed by default if when an app tried to do stuff it popped up the dialog at that time and asked for permissions needed to accomplish that task, but having to toggle stuff separately and restart the app each time is horrible UX.

Things work "relatively well" for billionaires and the status quo though.

You probably have no idea how much working class anger, how many unknown groups and "screams from the abyss" are being targeted, removed, censored, deranked before they gain any critical mass in this bizarre cybernetic web that's been created. I sure don't.

But sometimes you feel it on a gut level, flooded in a torrent of PR and entertainment, mind controlling algorithms and mainstream media with an increasingly tiny overton window disregarding the circus of culture wars farming attention and steering political anger for economic political gains - through a media landscape where all local news, actual working class papers representing real people, and diversity of thought has been replaced by thoughts™ approved by one of the few giga corporations working for a microscopic plutocracy.

It's over 100 years since Edward Bernays et al. invented modern PR, then came astroturfing, and now it's all so weird and colossal that no talks about what was seemingly obvious a century ago.