Why? Is there evidence to back this up? Are there massive customer write in campaigns trying to convince browser companies to push more AI?
>I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.
I love it. I love going to the AI place and knowingly consulting the AI for tasks I want the AI to perform. That relationship is healthy and responsible. It doesnt need to be in everything else. Its like those old jokes about how inventions are just <existing invention> + <digital clock>.
I dont need AI on the desktop, in microsoft office, replying to me on facebook, responding to my google searches AND doing shit in my browser. One of these would be too much, because I can just access the AI I want to speak to whenever I want it. Any 2 of these is such substantial overkill. Why do we have all of them? Justify it. Is there a user story where a user was trying to complete a task but lacked 97% accurate information from 5 different sources to complete the task?
And a copy paste task isnt necessarily going to be aided by a pop out sidebar running a local LLM chewing up already precious RAM. There's no guarantee its going to integrate correctly with the users chosen LLM provider.
Like we are looking at having LLM's inserted into almost every customer facing application. At some point, they will want a subscription for each of them or they are all going to need local resources. They are all going to have to be interoperable and run off the same account. Or you are going to have to have something that just works with the whole stack.
It doesn't make a lick of sense to try and preempt that situation, with mainline features pushed to all customers.
Googles approach, having a separate AI enabled browser makes the most sense. If it takes off its because of affirmative user consent and they can merge it into chrome. If it doesn't work they can silently discontinue it like so many other things.
It’s of course a mess and a mad rush for market share right now. That’s just a product of a healthy, competitive market. I agree that I’d rather have one AI service I pay for that integrates with all my apps.
AI integration in apps is about being able to feed in the context from the app into the model, like the web page or document. It’s much nicer to just ask the model about what you’re looking at directly rather than having to copy in context. I don’t have market research on this, but I do believe customers will expect it.
Someday hopefully the OS will allow apps to expose context and actions for a systemwide AI assistant. This is what Apple is trying to do with their Apple Intelligence for instance. If this works well, that’d be great.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
Very not.
They’re still very compelling as a user.
Options are nice. They were (and poteitally will) not making it optional and if people like me weren't "hostile to Ai" they wouldn't have had to back-track with this.
It's doubt based on previous actions.
I just think the average browser user in 5-10 years will expect the AI features. And plenty of others won’t want to use those features, and that’s fine.
It’s so nice just to be able to ask the browser to summarize the page, or ask questions about a long article.
I know a lot of people on Hacker News are hostile to AI and like to imagine everybody hates it, but I personally find it very helpful.