28 ms·

ChatGPT's Atlas: The Browser That's Anti-Web

803 points by AndrewDucker 1y ago

wilg 1y ago
1 - nobody cares about being "pro-web" or "anti-web" 2 - we didn't leave command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago
- Grimblewald 1y ago
  1 - I care 2 - That's an entirely different situation and you know it.
- gjvc 1y ago
  I want to hear more garbage like this. Do you have a website?
xnx 1y ago
The Atlas implementation isn't great, but I'll pick something that tries to represent my interests every time. The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance. Users need something working on their behalf to mine through the garbage to pull out the useful bits. An AI browser is the next logical step after uBlock.
- andrewmutz 1y ago
  Completely agree. Consumers won’t pay for anything online, which means every business model is user-hostile. Use the web for five minutes without an ad blocker and it’s obvious. Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.
  - lynx97 1y ago
    Complete unrelated to what you actual wrote about, but... This is the second time in a week that I hear dreck used in english. Before, I never noticed it anywhere. First was from the "singing chemist" scene in Breaking Bad, and now in your writing. I wasn't aware english adopted this word from German as well. Weird, that I never heard it until just now, while the scene I watched is already 15 years or so old...
    - darylteo 1y ago
      Baader-meinhof phenomenon
      - lynx97 1y ago
        Well, while I can never be sure about my own biases, I submit this particular instance is/was not an "illusion". I truely never heard the word dreck used in english before. Why do I know? I am a german native speaker, and I submit that I would have noticed it if I ever heard it earlier, simply because I know its meaning in my native lang and that would have made spotting it rather easy. I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
    - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
      Merriam Webster dates the English word "dreck" to 1922, though it seems to come from the Yiddish drek and is therefore much older.
    - Timwi 1y ago
      As another commenter noted, it was loaned from Yiddish rather than German, although the two languages are very closely related. There are many Yiddish words in English that have come from the Jewish diaspora. Common ones I can think of are schlep (carry something heavy) and kvetch (complain loudly). Since this is Hacker News, the Yiddish word I think we use the most is glitch. Of course there are also words from Hebrew origin entering English the same way, like behemoth, kosher, messiah...
      - deleted 1y ago
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      - lynx97 1y ago
        Very interesting, thanks! Quetsch in german actually means "to squeeze". So while apparently related, has changed its meaning.
  - soiltype 1y ago
    > Consumers won’t pay for anything online I think we should note that this is a situation created by the businesses more than the consumers. By offering "free" products they drove paid products out of the market. They didn't have to do that. But if I'm going to be as fair as possible, it's only regulation that could have stopped such a niche feom being exploited. One business or another would have eventually figured it out.
  - 52-6F-62 1y ago
    The HN community used to RAGE against walled gardens now it begs for one? The web was supposed to set us free and you cry out for chains? It's in your hands. It's literally in the hands of this entire forum. There is nobody else to blame.
  - deleted 1y ago
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  - bagacrap 1y ago
    Why would you trust an LLM to make the right decisions on your behalf? You think it can't be tricked by dark patterns? LLMs can't even follow direct orders much less detect deception or ill intent. I guess you did say "the idea of" not "the reality of".
- nneonneo 1y ago
  uBlock just takes stuff off of a page that shouldn't be there in the first place. All the content that should be there is still there, unchanged. An AI browser is choosing to send all the stuff you browse, to a third party without a demonstrated interest in keeping it all private, and getting back stuff that might or might not be true to the original content. Or maybe not even true at all. Oh and - Atlas will represent your interests, right up until OpenAI decides it's not in their financial interest to do so. What do you do when the entire web browser UI gets enshittified?
- osigurdson 1y ago
  >> The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.
  - cmeacham98 1y ago
    Where do I cut the $10/month? No like seriously, I'd easily pay $10/month to never see another ad, cookie banner, dark pattern, or have my information resold again. As long as that $10 is promised to never increase, other than adjustments for inflation. But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
    - lobochrome 1y ago
      Kagi.com
      - MengerSponge 1y ago
        Setting up Kagi is as big an improvement to search as an ad blocker is to your general internet experience. After about a week you forget how bad the bare experience is, and after a month you'll never go back.
        brendoelfrendo 1y ago
        I'm definitely behind some of my peers on adopting LLMs for general knowledge questions and web search, and I wonder if this is why. Kagi does have AI tools, but their search is ad free and good enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for with little fuss.
    - didibus 1y ago
      You'd need to pay a lot more, because advertisers pay way more than 10$ per month per user, you'd have to outpay the advertisers.
- garciansmith 1y ago
  Ublock Origin allows me to control what I see while that information is still in its original context so that I can take that into account when doing research, making decisions, etc. But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless. And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?
- didibus 1y ago
  One reason I now often go to ChatGPT instead of many Google queries is that the experience is ads free, quick and responsive. That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits. So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
  - runako 1y ago
    > quick and responsive This is kind of surprising, because those are precisely the ways I would say that a Web search is better than ChatGPT. Google is generally sub second to get to results, and quite frequently either page 1 or 2 will have some relevant results. With ChatGPT, I get to watch as it processes for an unpredictable amount of time, then I get to watch it "type". > ads free Free of ads where ChatGPT was paid to deliver them. Because it was trained on the public Internet, it is full of advertising content. Update: Example query I just did for "apartment Seville". Google completed in under a second. All the results above the fold are organic, with sponsored way down. Notably the results include purchase, long-term and vacation rental sites. The first 3 are listing sites. There's an interactive map in case I know where I want to go; apartments on the map include links to their websites. To see more links, I click "Next." ChatGPT (MacOS native app) took ~9 seconds and recommended a single agency, to which it does not link. Below that, it has bullet points that link to some relevant sites, but the links do not include vacation rentals. There are 4 links to apartment sites, plus a link to a Guardian article about Seville cracking down on illegal vacation rentals. To see more links, I type a request to see more. For all the talk about Google burying the organic links under a flood of ads, ChatGPT shows me far fewer links. As a person who happily pays for and uses ChatGPT daily, I think it's smart to be honest about its strengths and shortcomings.
    - ghm2180 1y ago
      Google is SEOed a lot. And while apartment sevile is a subset where Google is probably very good. For many things it gives me very bad results e.g. searching for affordable haircut always gives me a yelp link(there is a yelp link for ever adjective + physical storefront SMB). That being said I've never really come across on what are some good general ways to Google to give me good results. I know some tricks e.g. Filetype:PDF , use scholar for academic search, use "site:...". smth like "site:reddit.com/r/Washington quiet cafe" for most things people would want to do in a city, because people generally ask about those things on community forums. But I have a poor time with dev related queries because 1/2 the time it's seo'd content and when I don't know enough about a subject, LLMs generally gives me a lot of lines of inquiries(be careful of X and also consider Y) that I would not bother to ask cause I don't know what I don't know.
- strogonoff 1y ago
  It seems naive to expect a product by a company that desperately needs a lot of revenue to cover even a tiny part of investor money that it burned—where said product offers unprecedented opportunity to productize users in ways never possible before, and said company has previously demonstrated its disregard for ethics—to represent user’s interests. It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.
  - ctxc 1y ago
    Well articulated!
  - xnx 1y ago
    Yes. I don't and won't use any OpenAI products, but they product category of "AI Browser" is sorely needed.
- darepublic 1y ago
  not sure about that. I'll be happy with ublock thanks
- bandrami 1y ago
  Gopher. Gemini (the protocol not the AI). IRC.
- monooso 1y ago
  So you believe this browser is attempting to represent your interests, and work on your behalf?
- hshdhdhehd 1y ago
  Oh sweet summer lamb
- rchaud 1y ago
  The next logical step after Ublock is to have a succession structure in place if Raymond Hill or the maintainers of the various blocklists it's based on, decide they don't want to work on it anymore.
deleted 1y ago
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zitterbewegung 1y ago
This and the new device that OpenAI is working on is more of a general strategy to make a bigger moat by having more of an ecosystem so that people will keep their subscriptions and also get pro.
- echelon 1y ago
  Atlas strategy: - Atlas slurps the web to get more training data, bypassing Reddit blocks, Cloudflare blocks, paywalls, etc. It probably enriches the data with additional user signals that are useful. - Atlas is an attempt to build a sticky product that users won't switch away from. An LLM or image model doesn't really have sticky attachment, but if it starts storing all of your history and data, the switching costs could become immense. (Assuming it actually provides value and isn't a gimmick.) - Build pillars of an interconnected platform. Key "panes of glass" for digital lives, commerce, sales intent, etc. in the platformization strategy. The hardware play, the social network play -- OpenAI is trying to mint itself as a new "Mag 7", and Atlas could be a major piece in the puzzle. - Eat into precious Google revenue. Every Atlas user is a decrease in Google search/ads revenue.
  - gscott 1y ago
    Ycombinator Application: Replace entire World Wide Web with my own WWW Response: Already achieved by OpenAI!
  - 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
    https://stockanalysis.com/list/magnificent-seven/ https://stockanalysis.com/list/magnificent-seven/ I guess Mag 7 is the new FAANG, not the mag-7 shotgun
- ElijahLynn 1y ago
  Which hopefully will keep it free of ads (even for free users) that destroyed the current ad-riddled web.
  - 52-6F-62 1y ago
ec109685 1y ago
OpenAI should be 100% required to rev share with content creators (just like radio stations pay via compulsory licenses for the music they play), but this is a weird complaint: > “sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box” If a human wrote that same article about Taylor Swift, would you say it completely fabricates content? Most “articles” on the web are just rewrites of someone else’s articles anyway and nobody goes after them as bad actors (they should).
Kreptaa 1y ago
It's really crazy that there is an entire ai generated internet. I have zero clue what the benefit of using this would be to me.Even if we argue that it is less ads and such, that would only be until they garner enough users to start pushing charges. Probably through even more obtrusive ads. I also need to laugh. Wasn't open AI just crying about people copying them not so long ago?
- SchemaLoad 1y ago
  The purpose is total control. You never leave their platform, there are no links out. You get all of your information and entertainment from their platform.
  - pimlottc 1y ago
    It’s also a classic tactic of emotional abuse: https://www.womenslaw.org/about-abuse/forms-abuse/emotional-and-psychological-abuse/forms-emotional-and-psychological-abuse-2 https://www.womenslaw.org/about-abuse/forms-abuse/emotional-...
fiatpandas 1y ago
1.0 - algorithmic ranking of real content, with direct links 2.0 - algorithmic feeds of real content with no outbound links - stay in the wall 3.0 - slop infects rankings and feeds, real content gets sublimated 4.0 - algorithmic feeds become only slop 5.0 - no more feeds or rankings, but on demand generative streams of slop within different walled slop gardens 6.0 - 4D slop that feeds itself, continuously turning in on itself and regenerating
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
> There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet. :skull:
dangoodmanUT 1y ago
I think the idea of "we're returning to the command line" is astute tbh, I've felt that subconciously and I think the author put it into words for me. The article does taste a bit "conspiracy theory" for me though
- dangoodmanUT 1y ago
  that being said, asking chatgpt to do research in 30 seconds for me that might require me to set aside an hour or two is causing me to make decisions about where to tinker and ideas to chase down much faster can never go back
  - h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
    That's great, you're already addicted. The perfect regular user.
- pimlottc 1y ago
  It’s not so much a conspiracy theory as it is a perfect alignment of market forces. Which is to say, you don’t need a cackling evil mastermind to get conspiracy-like outcomes, just the proper set of deleterious incentives.
- chartered_stack 1y ago
  I think we're returning to CLIs mostly because typing remains one of the fastest ways we can communicate with our computers. The traditional limitation was that CLIs required users to know exactly what they wanted the computer to do. This meant learning all commands, flags etc. GUIs emerged to make things easier for users to tell their computers what to do. You could just look at the screen and know that File > Save would save the file instead of remembering :w or :wq. They minimized friction and were polished to no end by companies like MSFT and AAPL. Now that technology has got to a point where our computers now can bridge the gap between what we said and what we meant reasonably well, we can go back to CLIs. We keep the speed and expressiveness of typing but without the old rigidity. I honestly can't wait for the future where we evolve interfaces to things we previously only dreamt of before.
dyauspitr 1y ago
Eh I use ChatGPT for so many things I realize how many projects I used to just let go by.
- r_singh 1y ago
  Me too, and as the number and maturity of my projects have grown, improving and maintaining them all together has become harder by a factor I haven’t encountered before
dtagames 1y ago
This article is deep, important, and easily misinterpreted. The TL;DR is that a plausible business model for AI companies is centered around surveillance advertising and content gating like Google or Meta, but in a much more insidious and invasive form. Worth reading to the end.
- brabel 1y ago
  I found the article is no more than ranting about something that they are just projecting. The browser may not be for everyone, but I think there’s a lot of value to an AI tool that helps you find what you’re looking for without shoving as many ads as possible down your throat while summarizing content to your needs. Supposing OpenAI is not the monster that is trying to kill the web and lock you up , can’t you see how that may be a useful tool?
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protocolture 1y ago
>We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason No we didnt.
- amrrs 1y ago
  If at all anything, Claude Code's success disproved this
  - falcor84 1y ago
    It's actually an interesting example, because unlike Warp that tries to be a CLI with AI, Claude defaults to the AI (unless you prefix with an exclamation mark). Maybe it says more about me, but I now find myself asking Claude to write for me even relatively short sed/awk invocations that would have been faster to type by hand. The uncharitable interpretation is that I'm lazy, but the charitable one I tell myself is that I don't want to context-switch and prefer to keep my working memory at the higher level problem. In any case, Claude Code is not really CLI, but rather a conversational interface.
  - dns_snek 1y ago
    Claude Code is a Terminal User Interface, not a Command Line Interface.
    - _joel 1y ago
      Well, it is if you just run claude -p "Question goes here" As that will print the answer only and exit.
      - dns_snek 1y ago
        But that's not how it's typically used, it's predominantly used in TUI mode so the popularity of CC doesn't tell us anything about popularity of the CLI.
  - lifthrasiir 1y ago
    Claude Code is a TUI (with "text"), not a CLI (with "command line"). The very point of CC is that you can replace a command line with human-readable texts.
zmmmmm 1y ago
Being "anti-web" is the least of its problems. This thing is an absolute security nightmare. The concept of opening up the full context of your authenticated sessions in your email, financial, healthcare or other web sites to ChatGPT is downright reckless. Aside from personal harm, the way they are pushing this is going to cause large scale data breaches at companies that harbour sensitive information. I've been the one pushing against hard blocking AI tools at my org so far but this may have turned me around for OpenAI at least.
- ghm2180 1y ago
  Is this the security flaw thingy that stores OAuth or Auth0 tokens in sqllite database with overly permissive read privileges on it?
  - zmmmmm 1y ago
    no I'm talking about the general concept of having ChatGPT passively able to read sensitive data / browser session state. Apart from the ever present risk they suck your data in for training, the threat of prompt injection or model inversion to steal secrets or execute transactions without your knowledge is extreme.
    - Terr_ 1y ago
      Right, the software is inherently a flaming security risk even if the vendor were perfectly trustworthy and moral. Well, unless the scenario is moot because such a vendor would never have released it in the first place.
- vitorgrs 1y ago
  I mean... Edge already have copilot integrated for years, and Edge actually have users, unlike Atlas. Not sure why people are getting shocked now...
  - therein 1y ago
    Microsoft calls everything copilot. It is unclear what they had back then under that name, and what they will have under it.
jwpapi 1y ago
I normally dont waste a lot of energy on politics. But this feels truly dystopian. We here on HN are all in our bubble, we know that AI responses are very prone to error and just great in mimicking. We can differentiate when to use and when not (more or less), but when I talk to non-tech people in a normal city not close to a tech hub, most of them treat ChatGPT as the all-knowing factual instance. They have no idea of the concious and unconcious bias on the responses, based on how we ask the questions. Unfortunately I think these are the majority of the people. If you combine all that with a shady Silicon Valley CEO under historical pressure to make OpenAI profitable after 64 billion in funding, regularly flirting with the US president, it seems always consequential to me that exactly what the author described is the goal. No matter the cost. As we all feel like AI progress is stagnating and mainly the production cost to get AI responses is going down, this almost seems like the only out for OpenAI to win.
khtbunkncbuc 1y ago
[dead]
Ethan312 1y ago
Atlas feels more like a task tool than a browser. It’s fast, but we might lose the open web experience for convenience.
roundatlas 1y ago
What now remains is, after hearing glowing feedback, Satya making this the default browser in Windows as part of Microsoft and OpenAI's next chapter.
rich_sasha 1y ago
The SV playbook is to create a product, make it indispensable and monopolise it. Microsoft did it with office software. Payment companies want to be monopolies. Social media are of course the ultimate monopolies - network effects mean there is only one winner. So I guess the only logical next step for Big AI is to destroy the web, once they have squeezed every last bit out of it. Or at least make it dependent on them. Who needs news sites when OpenAI can do it? Why blog - just prompt your BlogLLM with an idea. Why comment on blogs - your agent will do it for you. All while avoid child porn with 97% accuracy - somerhing human curated content surely cannot be trusted to do. So I am 0% surprised.
- bazmattaz 1y ago
  I’m not sure. I think we’ll live through a few years of AI slop before human created content becomes very popular again. I imagine a future where websites (like news outlets or blogs) will have something like a “100% human created” label on it. It will be a mark of pride for them to show off and they’ll attract users because of it
snorbleck 1y ago
This is amazing. My entire web browser session state for every private and personal website I sign onto every day will be used for training data. It's great! I love this. This is exactly the direction humans should be going in to not self-destruct. The future is looking bright, while the light in our brains dims to eventual darkness. Slowly. Tragically. And for what purpose exactly. So cool.
- andrethegiant 1y ago
  I have no plans in downloading Atlas either, but I think your browsing isn't used for training unless you opt in. > By default, we don’t use the content you browse to train our models. If you choose to opt-in this content, you can enable “include web browsing” in your data controls settings. Note, even if you opt into training, webpages that opt out of GPTBot, will not be trained on. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/
  - gtsop 1y ago
    [dead]
  - McDyver 1y ago
    Until the next update, when they conveniently have a "bug" that enables it by default
    - drusepth 1y ago
      The classic Brave approach!
- BrenBarn 1y ago
  "You're absolutely right!"
  - deleted 1y ago
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- 1y ago
adas4044 1y ago
Wow! Amazing post! You really nailed the complexities of AI browsers in ways that most people don't think about. I think there's also a doom paradox where if more people search with AI, this disincentives people from posting on their own blog and websites where incentives are usually ads could help support them. If AI is crawling and then spitting back information from your blog (you get no revenue), is there a point to post at all?
- survirtual 1y ago
  The point to posting anything is to share with your fellow kind new knowledge that lifts them, entertains them, or teaches them. If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. How sad.
  - driese 1y ago
    > If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. I think this is a bit dismissive towards people who create content because they enjoy doing it but also could not do it to this level without the revenue, like many indie Youtubers.
    - Levitz 1y ago
      If I could press a button and remove money from the internet, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I absolutely do enjoy content that is financed through ads. I really, REALLY do like some of the stuff, honest. But it is also the case that the internet has been turning into a marketing hellscape for the last couple decades, we've gotten to a point in which engagement is optimized to such a degree that society itself is hurting from it. Politically and psychologically. The damage is hard to quantify, yet I can't fathom the opportunity cost not being well into the billions. We'd be better off without that.
  - adas4044 1y ago
    "If you post for ad revenue" but recognize that a lot of creatives need to ad revenue to support themselves.
BrenBarn 1y ago
The thing about command lines is off base, but overall the article is right that the ickiness of this thing is exceeded only by its evil.
maxdo 1y ago
Every professional involved in saas, web , online content creation thinks the web is a beautiful thing. In reality the fact of social media means web failed long time ago, and it only serves a void not taken by mobile apps , and now llm agents. Why do I need to read everything about tailor Swift on you her web site , if I don’t know a single song of her ? ( I actually do ) . I don’t want a screaming website tells me about her best new album ever , and her tours if LLM knows I don’t like pop music . The other way around if you like her you’d like a different set of information. Website can do that for you
brendoelfrendo 1y ago
Atlas confuses me. Firefox already puts Claude or ChatGPT in my sidebar and has integrations so I can have it analyze or summarize content or help me with something on the page. Atlas looks like yet another Chromium fork that should have been a browser extension, not a revolutionary product that will secure OpenAI's market dominance.
- coffeefirst 1y ago
  Yep. I was playing around with both Atlas and Comet and, security and privacy issues aside, I can’t figure out what they’re for or what the point is. Except one: it gives them the default search engine and doesn’t let you change it. I asked Atlas about this and it told me that’s true, the AI features are just a hook, this is about lock in. Make of that what you will.
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
  It is not a fork, and it is a NewTab page Chrome extension. They didn't even change the codename that's displayed in the Settings page.
labrador 1y ago
I tested Google Search, Google Gemini and Claude with "Taylor Swift showgirl". Gemini and Claude gave me a description plus some links. Both were organized better than the Google search page. If I didn't like the description that Claude or Google gave me I could click on the Wikipedia link. Claude gave me a link to Spotify to listen while Gemini gave me a link to YouTube to watch and lisen. The complaint about the OpenAI browser seems to be it didn't show any links. I agree, that is a big problem. If you are just getting error prone AI output then it's pretty worthless.
- consp 1y ago
  Google search is an ad platform. Wait until the honeymoon days of the "AI" LLMs are over for the enshitification to ensue.
  - djmips 1y ago
    Ain't that the truth... I hope that "AI" LLMs will have their Linux, their local private versions that are on par.
r_singh 1y ago
At this point, my adoption of AI tools is motivated by fear of missing out or being left behind. I’m a self-taught programmer running my own SaaS. I have memory and training enabled. What I can objectively say about Atlas is that I’ve been using it and I’m hooked. It’s made me roughly twice as productive — I solved a particular problem in half the time because Atlas made it easy to discover relevant information and make it actionable. That said, affording so much control to a single company does make me uneasy.
- r_singh 1y ago
  Not sure why this got downvoted, but to clarify what I meant: With my repo connected via the GitHub app, I asked Atlas about a problem I was facing. After a few back-and-forth messages, it pointed me to a fork I might eventually have found myself — but only after a lot more time and trial-and-error. Maybe it was luck, but being able to attach files, link context from connected apps, and search across notes and docs in one place has cut a lot of friction for me.
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mediumsmart 1y ago
this website is mentioned best on Atlas Browser 25A362 in 1920x1080 resolution
frgturpwd 1y ago
Am I missing something here? I used it a few days ago and it does actually act like a web browser and give me the link. This seems to be a UI expectation issue rather than a "real philosophy".
kkarpkkarp 1y ago
Reposting on Bluesky. I like anti-web phrase. I think it will be a next phase after all those web 2.0 and web x.0 things. https://bsky.app/profile/kkarpieszuk.bsky.social/post/3m4cxfjn7wc2y https://bsky.app/profile/kkarpieszuk.bsky.social/post/3m4cxf...
hollowturtle 1y ago
Tangent but related, if only google search would do a serious come back instead of not finding nothing anymore, we would have a tool to compare ai to. Sure gemini integration might still be a thing but with actual working search results
- tigroferoce 1y ago
  You should try Kagi for this experience.
ValveFan6969 1y ago
>I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all. Sounds like the browser did you a favor. Wonder if she'll be suing.
andy_ppp 1y ago
Another edition of “if it’s free you are their product”…
- r_singh 1y ago
  It’s not entirely free though, agent mode and a few other features are paid. I’m paying OpenAI $200/mo for my subscription
k__ 1y ago
They gotta do this. If they don't put AI in every tool, they won't get new training data.
PeterStuer 1y ago
People are misinterpreting the gui/cli thing. There's 2 dimensions to it: determinism and discoverability. In the Adventure example, the ux is fully deterministic but not discoverable. Unless you know what the correct incantation is, there is no inherent way to discover it besides trial and error. Most cli's are like that (and imho phones with 'gestures' are even worse). That does not make a cli inefficient, unproductive or bad. I use cli all the time as I'm sure Anhil does, it just makes them more difficult to approach for the novice. But the second aspect of Atlas is its non determinism. There is no 'command' that predictivly always 'works'. You can engineer towards phrasings that are more often successfull, but you can't reach fidelity. This leeway is not without merrit. In theory the system is thus free to 'improve' over time without the user needing to. That is something you might find desirable or not.
- latexr 1y ago
  > In theory the system is thus free to 'improve' over time without the user needing to. It could just as well degrade, improvement is not the only path.
- joeiq 1y ago
  Yes, agreed! Autocomplete, or search suggestions, is the ultimate discoverability feature of the typing interaction.
- IshKebab 1y ago
  Exactly. Equating CLI and LLM text input is completely wrong. Hard to see past that huge mistake. Although there is one aspect in which the LLM interface still isn't discoverable - what interface does it have to the world. Can I asked Alexa+ to send a WhatsApp? I have no idea because it depends if the programmers gave it that interface.
falcor84 1y ago
It really lost me at >There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet. I can barely stomach it with John Oliver does it, but reading this sort of snark without hearing a British voice is too much for me.
- kleiba 1y ago
  Also, re: "a tiny handful of incredible nerds" - page 20 of this [0] document lists the sales figures for Infocom titles from 1981 to 1986: it sums up to over 2 million shipped units. Granted, that number does not equal the number "nerds" who played the games because the same player will probably have bought multiple titles if they enjoyed interactive fiction. However, also keep in mind that some of the games in that table were only available after 1981, i.e., at a later point during the 1981-1986 time frame. Also, the 80s were a prime decade for pirating games, so more people will have played Infocom titles than the sales figures suggest - the document itself mentions this because they sold hint books for some titles separately. [0] https://ia601302.us.archive.org/1/items/InfocomCabinetMiscSalesData/Infocom_Cabinet_Misc_Sales_Data.pdf https://ia601302.us.archive.org/1/items/InfocomCabinetMiscSa...
anthk 1y ago
>Sorry, I can't do that. 'Modern' Z-Machine games (v5 version compared to the original v3 one from Infocom) will allow you to do that and far more. By 'modern' I meant from the early 90's and up. Even more with v8 games. >This was also why people hated operating systems like MS-DOS, and why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface. The original v3 Z Machine parser (raw one) was pretty much limited compared to the v5 one. Even more with against the games made with Inform6 and the Inform6 English library targetting the v5 version. Go try yourself. Original Zork from MIT (Dungeon) converted into a v5 ZMachine game: https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fifarchive.org%2Fif-archive%2Fgames%2Fzcode%2Fzdungeon.z5 https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fifarchive.org%2Fif-... Spot the differences. For instance, you could both say 'take the rock' and, later, say 'drop it'. >take mat Taken. >drop it Dropped. >take the mat Taken. >drop mat Dropped. >open mailbox You open the mailbox, revealing a small leaflet. >take leaftlet You can't see any such thing. >take leaflet Taken. >drop it Dropped. Now, v5 games are from late 80's/early 90's. There's Curses, Jigsaw, Spider and Web ... v8 games are like Anchorhead, pretty advanced for its time: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7 https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7 You can either download the Z8 file and play it with Frotz (Linux/BSD), WinFrotz, or Lectrote under Android and anything else. Also, online with the web interpreter. Now, the 'excuses' about the terseness of the original Z3 parser are now nearly void; because with Puny Inform a lot of Z3 targetting games (for 8086 DOS PC's, C64's, Spectrums, MSX'...) have a slightly improved parser against the original Zork game.
danielfalbo 1y ago
I don't think the CLI one is a good analogy. > We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason Man I still love command-line so much > And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first. [...] guess what secret spell they had to type into their computer to get actual work done Well... docs and the "-h" do a pretty good job.
- motoxpro 1y ago
  The games he is talking about deliberately didn't have docs or help because that WAS the game, to guess. I think same here, while there are docs "please show me the correct way to do X," the surface area is so large the the analogy holds up still, in that you might as well just be guessing fo rhte right command.
hereme888 1y ago
> The fake web page had no information newer than two or three weeks old. What irks me the most about LLMs is when they lie about having followed your instructions to browse a site. And they keep lying, over and over again. For whatever reason, the ONE model that consistently does this is Gemini.
f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago
Speaking of anti-web: https://i.postimg.cc/br7F8NLd/chat-GPT.png https://i.postimg.cc/br7F8NLd/chat-GPT.png I wonder when webmasters will take theirs gloves off and just start feeding AI crawlers with porn and gore.
- 101008 1y ago
  This would be amazing. Such a shame it would only work if a large percentage does it.
darthnebula 1y ago
Yes, if I type Taylor Swift Showgirls I get some helpful information and a lot of links, but not her website. It isn't very different than what Google Gemini displays at the top of Google search results. Is it a webpage? Well... it displays in a browser... But if I type Taylor Swift, I get links to her website, instagram, facebook, etc. Is it a webpage? Well... it displays in a browser... This isn't Web 2.0, Anil. Things change.
- bagacrap 1y ago
  I despise the AI mode in Google and wish I could turn it off, but at least traditional results are just below it. > Well... it displays in a browser... Yes, a slop browser.
visarga 1y ago
One deal breaker for me - TTS (select and speak) is broken. It does not read the selected text.
amelius 1y ago
It's bad news if one company owns the search bar. Just like it's bad news if one company owns the roads or the telecom infrastructure. Governments need to prepare some strong regulation here. (Of course this is still true if it's not strictly a monopoly)
trashb 1y ago
> And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first. The part about Zork doesn't make sense to me. As I understand it text based adventure games are actually quite lenient with the input you can give, multiple options for the same action. Additionally certain keywords are "industry standard" in the same way that you walk using "wasd" in FPS games, so much that it became the title of the documentary "get lamp". Due to the players perceived knowledge of similar mechanics in other games you can even ague that providing these familiar commands is part of the game design. It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard. Projects like 1964's ELIZA prove that text based interfaces have been able to feel natural for a long time. Text has a high information density, but natural language is a notoriously bad interface for certain things. Like giving commands, therefore we invented command lines with different syntax and programming languages for instructing computers what to do.
- mpalmer 1y ago
  It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard Indeed. And this makes his judgmental pettiness about people who like these games all the shittier for it. I don't know why extremely-online bloggers think unrequited snark is a glide path to being funny.
  - kamranjon 1y ago
    I loved text based adventure games when I was growing up, but I also thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny. I’m a bit surprised people are so offended by this article, have we lost the ability to read something with nuance?
    - mpalmer 1y ago
      It's a bit weasel-y to refer to criticism as just "people being offended". > thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny I'm happy for you, but I didn't. To "read something with nuance" is to be open to nuance that is already present in the writing. This writing is not nuanced! Perhaps you're asking us to make an effort to be more tolerant of weak writing. That's a fair request when the writer is acting in good faith. But to mock nerds for liking text adventures when you clearly do not like them yourself is not acting in good faith.
anymouse123456 1y ago
I can't speak to the particular browser application. I haven't installed it and probably never will, but the language around text interfaces makes the OP sound... uninformed. Graphical applications can be more beautiful and discoverable, but they limit the user to only actions the authors have implemented and deployed. Text applications are far more composable and expressive, but they can be extremely difficult to discover and learn. We didn't abandon the shell or text interfaces. Many of us happily live in text all day every day. There are many tasks that suffer little by being limited and benefit enormously by being discoverable. These are mostly graphical now. There are many tasks that do not benefit much by spatial orientation and are a nightmare when needlessly constrained. These tasks benefit enormously by being more expressive and composable. These are still often implemented in text. The dream is to find a new balance between these two modes and our recent advances open up new territory for exploring where they converge and diverge.
- whilenot-dev 1y ago
  Am I the only one that interpreted OP in a way that they weren't opposed to neither CLIs, TUIs, nor GUIs at all? The topic wasn't "textual interface VS graphical interface", but "undocumented/natural language VS documented/query language" for navigating the internet. In addition to the analogy of the textual interface used in Zork, we could say that it'd be like interacting with any REST API without knowledge about its specification - guessing endpoints, methods, and parameters while assuming best practices (of "natural-ness" kind). Do we really want to explore an API like that, through naive hacking? Does a natural language wrapper make this hacking any better? It can make it more fun as it breaks patterns, sure, but is that really what we want?
  - anymouse123456 1y ago
    I'm not focused on this particular browser or the idea of using LLMs as a locus of control. I haven't used it and have no intention of using it. I'm reacting to the OP articulating clearly dismissive and incorrect claims about text-based applications in general. As one example, a section is titled with: > We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason This is immediately followed by an anecdote that is probably true for OP, but doesn't match my recollection at all. I recall being immersed and mesmerized by Zork. I played it endlessly on my TRS-80 and remember the system supporting reasonable variation in the input commands. At any rate, it's strange to hold up text based entertainment applications while ignoring the thousands of text based tools that continue to be used daily. They go on with hyperbolic language like: > ...but people were thrilled to leave command-line interfaces behind back in the 1990s It's 2025. I create and use GUI applications, but I live in the terminal all day long, every day. Many of us have not left the command line behind and would be horrified if we had to. It's not either/or, but the OP makes incorrect claims that text based interfaces are archaic and have long been universally abandoned. They have not, and at least some of us believe we're headed toward a new golden age of mixed mode (Text & GUI) applications in the not-so-distant future.
kopochameleon 1y ago
Same author's impact on web preservation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230
- kristianc 1y ago
  He's a great talker. Delivery record more mixed.
  - arresin 1y ago
    What’s your beef with him?
glitchc 1y ago
It sounds like a great opportunity to poison the well. Create a bot farm that points the browser to every dank and musty corner of the web ad naseum: Old Yahoo, Myspace and Geocities pages, 4chan, 8chan, etc. Let's flood the system with junk and watch it implode.
kristianc 1y ago
Dash’s entire identity is bound up with narrating technology by translating its cultural shifts into moral parables. His record at actually building things is, at best, spotty. Now the LLM takes that role by absorbing, it summarising, editorialising. And like Winer, he often reads like a guy who has never really made peace with the modern era and who isn't content to declare the final draft of history unless it's had his fingerprints on it. The machine is suddenly the narrator, and it doesn’t cite him. When he calls Atlas “anti-web,” he’s really saying it is “anti-author”. In a way though, how much do we need people to narrate these shifts for us? Isn't the point of these technologies that we are able to do things for ourselves rather than rely on mediators to interpret it for us? If he can be outcompeted by LLMs, does that not just show how shallow his shtick is?
- tolerance 1y ago
  I think you’re on to something. In a way this is just the postmodern ethos of the web collapsing in on itself.
speak_plainly 1y ago
I opened ChatGPT on my Mac this morning and there was an update. I updated ChatGPT and a little window popped up asking me to download Atlas. I declined as I already have it downloaded. There was another window, similar to the update available window, in my chat asking me to download Atlas again...I went to hit the 'X' to close it and I somehow triggered it, it opened my browser to the Atlas page and triggered a download of Atlas. This was not cool and has further shaken my already low confidence in OpenAI.
- georgefrowny 1y ago
  The only confidence I have in OpenAI at this point is that they will be using scummy tricks like that all the time. What have they ever done to earn confidence in the other direction? They can't even lie and blame it on a programming fuckup because they'd have to say AI driven code is buggy.
- pjc50 1y ago
  I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI.
  - Sharlin 1y ago
    All the other similar cases I can think of are either something universally vilified, like aggressive telemarketers, or outright scams. AI firms are in a good company it seems.
  - 52-6F-62 1y ago
    There is a giant, glowing, screaming and shouting reason why and yet everyone pretends it's a mystery still.
  - burnte 1y ago
    > I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI. That's why they have to push it so hard. They spent a lot of money on it and they NEED us to buy it so they don't take a loss, so their tactic is to try to force it on us. It happens to many companies, you start a disruptor and get huge because you did what the market wanted and competitors didn't. Then, later, you don't want the market to go in a direction, so you try to stack the market, never once realizing that another disruptor will come along to upset your apple cart. You can control some of the market all of the time, and all of the market some of the time, but you can't control all of the market all of the time.
kwa32 1y ago
how is this different from just training on your history
kingkawn 1y ago
People didn’t hate DOS it just was what it was
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
strikefo 1y ago
I think Atlas sounds and acts pretty terrible, but the Dia browser has been a pretty nice experience for me. You still have access to the web, favorite links in the sidebar, etc.; and the option (when you want or need) to "chat" with the current website you are on using an LLM.
Levitating 1y ago
I am still confused in what way this is "anti-web". Is it actually harming the current web, or just providing a bad interface to it? > The amount of data they're gathering is unfathomable. The author suggests that GPT continuously reads information like typed keystrokes etc, I don't see why that's implied. And it wouldn't be new either, with tools like Windows Replay.
- soiltype 1y ago
  > I don't see why that's implied Because "it wouldn't be new either, with tools like Windows Replay". Genuinely, why would they leave any data on the table if they don't have to? That's the entire purpose of the browser.
  - Levitating 1y ago
    > Genuinely, why would they leave any data on the table if they don't have to? That's the entire purpose of the browser. Because extracting and using that data may not be trivial, practically and legally speaking. I am sure they use the chat input you send them for training. But to say that they transfer all the websites you visit to their servers, or that they can monitor your keyboard input either by continuously streaming your window or your keyboard events to their servers. All of that would be a small technical feat and noticeable in the created traffic. My belief is that they simply hacked together an AI web-browser in the least amount of time with the least amount of effort, so that they can showcase another use for AI. That would be a much simpler explanation than them building a personal surveillance tool that wants to know what you've typed and keeps track of the time you've spent looking for shoes.
PaulHoule 1y ago
One could make the case that the web of 2025 is anti-human. AI clients are one of very few exits we have from enshittification. ChatGPT can read all the ads so you don’t have to. The whole point of those annoying CAPTCHAs and those stupidity anime girls on all the kernel web sites is slamming the door from any exit from Google’s world that we live in.
hermitcrab 1y ago
'Atlas' as in 'Atlas Shrugged' by any chance? If so, ugh.
oldestofsports 1y ago
”why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface.” I read this in my TUI RSS reader lol
karaterobot 1y ago
The headline is incorrect, it should say "A Browser That's Anti-Web". Many other browsers are also trying to destroy the web for their own benefit, including some you may have heard of.
bradgessler 1y ago
I’m surprised 1Password isn’t trying to get into this game. Imagine a browser that lets people define sandboxes and scope credential that an LLM may access to complete certain tasks? I’d love to have a browser download all of my utility bills for taxes. I’d setup a browser, limit it to a few URLs, give it access to a few credentials, and then let it rip.
thetrees 1y ago
Condensed version: 'OpenAI built a browser that mostly benefits OpenAI. Instead, they should have built a browser that mostly benefits the customer (and, thus, benefits OpenAI less).' Welcome to capitalism. I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the system we have. If you want OpenAI to do things differently, another company has to do it differently, show that doing it differently is even more profitable (see Apple and their privacy angle), and force OpenAI to change for competitive reasons. Or figure out some way to trick our way into a constitutional convention so we can change the system.
pranavvishnu 1y ago
Hi - Pranav from the ChatGPT Atlas team here. Appreciate the discussion and feedback here. Just wanted to correct a few specifics so there’s no confusion: - We have tried to make Atlas a great way to browse the open web, and invested heavily in the search experience as we covered in the livestream. When I test typing “taylor swift" into Atlas I see links to the website in the autocomplete carousel, at the top of the results page, in inline citations within chat, and in the Search tab. We’re also working on making these faster and more prominent when we’re sure you want a link, for ex. you’ll see a large vertical list of links at the top of the chat response when you type in something like “gmail”. - Browser memories are opt-in, and by default we don’t train on the contents of pages you browse—even when memories are enabled. Keeping the Ask ChatGPT sidebar open has no bearing on what gets sent to us. Webpages are clearly displayed as attachments you can disable in the chat, and only sent to us when you submit the prompts. - Ask ChatGPT and Agent mode are not workarounds to user or publisher training settings. Even if a user has training enabled, we will still respect publisher preferences to block GPTBot in their robots.txt and do not train on that content.
- rgun 1y ago
  This is akin to saying "We are not evil, today"
  - bagacrap 1y ago
    "we are not evil, we are one default away from being evil!"
    - bagacrap 1y ago
      Haha, wait, the training directly on websites is off by default, but if you use browser memories, training on that is on by default. Browser memories contain arbitrary amounts of information from websites... Anil's point is that Chatgpt can't, on its own, train on data that requires a login. So Atlas is in fact automating training on login-walled content, and doing so by default, but also adding decoy settings that make you think it's not. No evil here!

803 points by AndrewDucker 1y ago

wilg 1y ago

1 - nobody cares about being "pro-web" or "anti-web" 2 - we didn't leave command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago

Grimblewald 1y ago
1 - I care 2 - That's an entirely different situation and you know it.
gjvc 1y ago
I want to hear more garbage like this. Do you have a website?

xnx 1y ago

The Atlas implementation isn't great, but I'll pick something that tries to represent my interests every time. The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance. Users need something working on their behalf to mine through the garbage to pull out the useful bits. An AI browser is the next logical step after uBlock.

andrewmutz 1y ago
Completely agree. Consumers won’t pay for anything online, which means every business model is user-hostile. Use the web for five minutes without an ad blocker and it’s obvious. Atlas may not be the solution but I love the idea of an LLM that sits between me and the dreck that is today’s web.
- lynx97 1y ago
  Complete unrelated to what you actual wrote about, but... This is the second time in a week that I hear dreck used in english. Before, I never noticed it anywhere. First was from the "singing chemist" scene in Breaking Bad, and now in your writing. I wasn't aware english adopted this word from German as well. Weird, that I never heard it until just now, while the scene I watched is already 15 years or so old...
  - darylteo 1y ago
    Baader-meinhof phenomenon
    - lynx97 1y ago
      Well, while I can never be sure about my own biases, I submit this particular instance is/was not an "illusion". I truely never heard the word dreck used in english before. Why do I know? I am a german native speaker, and I submit that I would have noticed it if I ever heard it earlier, simply because I know its meaning in my native lang and that would have made spotting it rather easy. I also believe noticing Baader-meinhof in the 90s is rather unsurprising, since RAF was just "a few years" ago. However, "dreck" as someone else noted is documented since the early 20th century. So I dont think me noticing this just recently isn't a bias, rather a true coincidence. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frequency_illusion
  - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
    Merriam Webster dates the English word "dreck" to 1922, though it seems to come from the Yiddish drek and is therefore much older.
  - Timwi 1y ago
    As another commenter noted, it was loaned from Yiddish rather than German, although the two languages are very closely related. There are many Yiddish words in English that have come from the Jewish diaspora. Common ones I can think of are schlep (carry something heavy) and kvetch (complain loudly). Since this is Hacker News, the Yiddish word I think we use the most is glitch. Of course there are also words from Hebrew origin entering English the same way, like behemoth, kosher, messiah...
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - lynx97 1y ago
      Very interesting, thanks! Quetsch in german actually means "to squeeze". So while apparently related, has changed its meaning.
- soiltype 1y ago
  > Consumers won’t pay for anything online I think we should note that this is a situation created by the businesses more than the consumers. By offering "free" products they drove paid products out of the market. They didn't have to do that. But if I'm going to be as fair as possible, it's only regulation that could have stopped such a niche feom being exploited. One business or another would have eventually figured it out.
- 52-6F-62 1y ago
  The HN community used to RAGE against walled gardens now it begs for one? The web was supposed to set us free and you cry out for chains? It's in your hands. It's literally in the hands of this entire forum. There is nobody else to blame.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- bagacrap 1y ago
  Why would you trust an LLM to make the right decisions on your behalf? You think it can't be tricked by dark patterns? LLMs can't even follow direct orders much less detect deception or ill intent. I guess you did say "the idea of" not "the reality of".
nneonneo 1y ago
uBlock just takes stuff off of a page that shouldn't be there in the first place. All the content that should be there is still there, unchanged. An AI browser is choosing to send all the stuff you browse, to a third party without a demonstrated interest in keeping it all private, and getting back stuff that might or might not be true to the original content. Or maybe not even true at all. Oh and - Atlas will represent your interests, right up until OpenAI decides it's not in their financial interest to do so. What do you do when the entire web browser UI gets enshittified?
osigurdson 1y ago
>> The modern commercial web is an adversarial network of attention theft and annoyance It feels like $10 / month would be sufficient to solve this problem. Yet, we've all insisted that everything must be free.
- cmeacham98 1y ago
  Where do I cut the $10/month? No like seriously, I'd easily pay $10/month to never see another ad, cookie banner, dark pattern, or have my information resold again. As long as that $10 is promised to never increase, other than adjustments for inflation. But I can't actually make that payment - except maybe by purchasing a paid adblocker - where ironically the best open source option (uBlock Origin) doesn't even accept donations.
  - lobochrome 1y ago
    Kagi.com
    - MengerSponge 1y ago
      Setting up Kagi is as big an improvement to search as an ad blocker is to your general internet experience. After about a week you forget how bad the bare experience is, and after a month you'll never go back.
      - brendoelfrendo 1y ago
        I'm definitely behind some of my peers on adopting LLMs for general knowledge questions and web search, and I wonder if this is why. Kagi does have AI tools, but their search is ad free and good enough that I can usually find what I'm looking for with little fuss.
  - didibus 1y ago
    You'd need to pay a lot more, because advertisers pay way more than 10$ per month per user, you'd have to outpay the advertisers.
garciansmith 1y ago
Ublock Origin allows me to control what I see while that information is still in its original context so that I can take that into account when doing research, making decisions, etc. But isn't this, instead, letting a third party strip that context away and give it its own context so that you can't make those choices and decisions properly? Information without context is, to me, nearly worthless. And even if you believe they are neutral parties and have your own interests at heart (which, quite frankly, I think is naive), once companies like that know everything about you, you don't think they'll abuse that knowledge?
didibus 1y ago
One reason I now often go to ChatGPT instead of many Google queries is that the experience is ads free, quick and responsive. That said, don't be lured, you know they're already working on ways to put ads and trackers and what not inside ChatGPT and Atlas, those 20$ sound won't pay enough to recoup all that investment and cost and maximize profits. So I think we should be careful what we wish for here.
- runako 1y ago
  > quick and responsive This is kind of surprising, because those are precisely the ways I would say that a Web search is better than ChatGPT. Google is generally sub second to get to results, and quite frequently either page 1 or 2 will have some relevant results. With ChatGPT, I get to watch as it processes for an unpredictable amount of time, then I get to watch it "type". > ads free Free of ads where ChatGPT was paid to deliver them. Because it was trained on the public Internet, it is full of advertising content. Update: Example query I just did for "apartment Seville". Google completed in under a second. All the results above the fold are organic, with sponsored way down. Notably the results include purchase, long-term and vacation rental sites. The first 3 are listing sites. There's an interactive map in case I know where I want to go; apartments on the map include links to their websites. To see more links, I click "Next." ChatGPT (MacOS native app) took ~9 seconds and recommended a single agency, to which it does not link. Below that, it has bullet points that link to some relevant sites, but the links do not include vacation rentals. There are 4 links to apartment sites, plus a link to a Guardian article about Seville cracking down on illegal vacation rentals. To see more links, I type a request to see more. For all the talk about Google burying the organic links under a flood of ads, ChatGPT shows me far fewer links. As a person who happily pays for and uses ChatGPT daily, I think it's smart to be honest about its strengths and shortcomings.
  - ghm2180 1y ago
    Google is SEOed a lot. And while apartment sevile is a subset where Google is probably very good. For many things it gives me very bad results e.g. searching for affordable haircut always gives me a yelp link(there is a yelp link for ever adjective + physical storefront SMB). That being said I've never really come across on what are some good general ways to Google to give me good results. I know some tricks e.g. Filetype:PDF , use scholar for academic search, use "site:...". smth like "site:reddit.com/r/Washington quiet cafe" for most things people would want to do in a city, because people generally ask about those things on community forums. But I have a poor time with dev related queries because 1/2 the time it's seo'd content and when I don't know enough about a subject, LLMs generally gives me a lot of lines of inquiries(be careful of X and also consider Y) that I would not bother to ask cause I don't know what I don't know.
strogonoff 1y ago
It seems naive to expect a product by a company that desperately needs a lot of revenue to cover even a tiny part of investor money that it burned—where said product offers unprecedented opportunity to productize users in ways never possible before, and said company has previously demonstrated its disregard for ethics—to represent user’s interests. It’s unlikely LLM operators can break even by charging per use, and it should be expected that they’ll race to capture the market by offering “free” products that in reality are ad serving machines, a time-tested business model that has served Meta and friends very well. The fact that Atlas browser is (and they don’t even hide it) a way to work around usage limits of ChatGPT should ring alarm bells.
- ctxc 1y ago
  Well articulated!
- xnx 1y ago
  Yes. I don't and won't use any OpenAI products, but they product category of "AI Browser" is sorely needed.
darepublic 1y ago
not sure about that. I'll be happy with ublock thanks
bandrami 1y ago
Gopher. Gemini (the protocol not the AI). IRC.
monooso 1y ago
So you believe this browser is attempting to represent your interests, and work on your behalf?
hshdhdhehd 1y ago
Oh sweet summer lamb
rchaud 1y ago
The next logical step after Ublock is to have a succession structure in place if Raymond Hill or the maintainers of the various blocklists it's based on, decide they don't want to work on it anymore.

deleted 1y ago

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zitterbewegung 1y ago

This and the new device that OpenAI is working on is more of a general strategy to make a bigger moat by having more of an ecosystem so that people will keep their subscriptions and also get pro.

echelon 1y ago
Atlas strategy: - Atlas slurps the web to get more training data, bypassing Reddit blocks, Cloudflare blocks, paywalls, etc. It probably enriches the data with additional user signals that are useful. - Atlas is an attempt to build a sticky product that users won't switch away from. An LLM or image model doesn't really have sticky attachment, but if it starts storing all of your history and data, the switching costs could become immense. (Assuming it actually provides value and isn't a gimmick.) - Build pillars of an interconnected platform. Key "panes of glass" for digital lives, commerce, sales intent, etc. in the platformization strategy. The hardware play, the social network play -- OpenAI is trying to mint itself as a new "Mag 7", and Atlas could be a major piece in the puzzle. - Eat into precious Google revenue. Every Atlas user is a decrease in Google search/ads revenue.
- gscott 1y ago
  Ycombinator Application: Replace entire World Wide Web with my own WWW Response: Already achieved by OpenAI!
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  https://stockanalysis.com/list/magnificent-seven/ https://stockanalysis.com/list/magnificent-seven/ I guess Mag 7 is the new FAANG, not the mag-7 shotgun
ElijahLynn 1y ago
Which hopefully will keep it free of ads (even for free users) that destroyed the current ad-riddled web.
- 52-6F-62 1y ago

ec109685 1y ago

OpenAI should be 100% required to rev share with content creators (just like radio stations pay via compulsory licenses for the music they play), but this is a weird complaint: > “sometimes this tool completely fabricates content, gives me a box that looks like a search box, and shows me the fabricated content in a display that looks like a web page when I type in the fake search box” If a human wrote that same article about Taylor Swift, would you say it completely fabricates content? Most “articles” on the web are just rewrites of someone else’s articles anyway and nobody goes after them as bad actors (they should).

Kreptaa 1y ago

It's really crazy that there is an entire ai generated internet. I have zero clue what the benefit of using this would be to me.Even if we argue that it is less ads and such, that would only be until they garner enough users to start pushing charges. Probably through even more obtrusive ads. I also need to laugh. Wasn't open AI just crying about people copying them not so long ago?

SchemaLoad 1y ago
The purpose is total control. You never leave their platform, there are no links out. You get all of your information and entertainment from their platform.
- pimlottc 1y ago
  It’s also a classic tactic of emotional abuse: https://www.womenslaw.org/about-abuse/forms-abuse/emotional-and-psychological-abuse/forms-emotional-and-psychological-abuse-2 https://www.womenslaw.org/about-abuse/forms-abuse/emotional-...

fiatpandas 1y ago

1.0 - algorithmic ranking of real content, with direct links 2.0 - algorithmic feeds of real content with no outbound links - stay in the wall 3.0 - slop infects rankings and feeds, real content gets sublimated 4.0 - algorithmic feeds become only slop 5.0 - no more feeds or rankings, but on demand generative streams of slop within different walled slop gardens 6.0 - 4D slop that feeds itself, continuously turning in on itself and regenerating

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

> There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet. :skull:

dangoodmanUT 1y ago

I think the idea of "we're returning to the command line" is astute tbh, I've felt that subconciously and I think the author put it into words for me. The article does taste a bit "conspiracy theory" for me though

dangoodmanUT 1y ago
that being said, asking chatgpt to do research in 30 seconds for me that might require me to set aside an hour or two is causing me to make decisions about where to tinker and ideas to chase down much faster can never go back
- h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
  That's great, you're already addicted. The perfect regular user.
pimlottc 1y ago
It’s not so much a conspiracy theory as it is a perfect alignment of market forces. Which is to say, you don’t need a cackling evil mastermind to get conspiracy-like outcomes, just the proper set of deleterious incentives.
chartered_stack 1y ago
I think we're returning to CLIs mostly because typing remains one of the fastest ways we can communicate with our computers. The traditional limitation was that CLIs required users to know exactly what they wanted the computer to do. This meant learning all commands, flags etc. GUIs emerged to make things easier for users to tell their computers what to do. You could just look at the screen and know that File > Save would save the file instead of remembering :w or :wq. They minimized friction and were polished to no end by companies like MSFT and AAPL. Now that technology has got to a point where our computers now can bridge the gap between what we said and what we meant reasonably well, we can go back to CLIs. We keep the speed and expressiveness of typing but without the old rigidity. I honestly can't wait for the future where we evolve interfaces to things we previously only dreamt of before.

dyauspitr 1y ago

Eh I use ChatGPT for so many things I realize how many projects I used to just let go by.

r_singh 1y ago
Me too, and as the number and maturity of my projects have grown, improving and maintaining them all together has become harder by a factor I haven’t encountered before

dtagames 1y ago

This article is deep, important, and easily misinterpreted. The TL;DR is that a plausible business model for AI companies is centered around surveillance advertising and content gating like Google or Meta, but in a much more insidious and invasive form. Worth reading to the end.

brabel 1y ago
I found the article is no more than ranting about something that they are just projecting. The browser may not be for everyone, but I think there’s a lot of value to an AI tool that helps you find what you’re looking for without shoving as many ads as possible down your throat while summarizing content to your needs. Supposing OpenAI is not the monster that is trying to kill the web and lock you up , can’t you see how that may be a useful tool?

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protocolture 1y ago

>We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason No we didnt.

amrrs 1y ago
If at all anything, Claude Code's success disproved this
- falcor84 1y ago
  It's actually an interesting example, because unlike Warp that tries to be a CLI with AI, Claude defaults to the AI (unless you prefix with an exclamation mark). Maybe it says more about me, but I now find myself asking Claude to write for me even relatively short sed/awk invocations that would have been faster to type by hand. The uncharitable interpretation is that I'm lazy, but the charitable one I tell myself is that I don't want to context-switch and prefer to keep my working memory at the higher level problem. In any case, Claude Code is not really CLI, but rather a conversational interface.
- dns_snek 1y ago
  Claude Code is a Terminal User Interface, not a Command Line Interface.
  - _joel 1y ago
    Well, it is if you just run claude -p "Question goes here" As that will print the answer only and exit.
    - dns_snek 1y ago
      But that's not how it's typically used, it's predominantly used in TUI mode so the popularity of CC doesn't tell us anything about popularity of the CLI.
- lifthrasiir 1y ago
  Claude Code is a TUI (with "text"), not a CLI (with "command line"). The very point of CC is that you can replace a command line with human-readable texts.

zmmmmm 1y ago

Being "anti-web" is the least of its problems. This thing is an absolute security nightmare. The concept of opening up the full context of your authenticated sessions in your email, financial, healthcare or other web sites to ChatGPT is downright reckless. Aside from personal harm, the way they are pushing this is going to cause large scale data breaches at companies that harbour sensitive information. I've been the one pushing against hard blocking AI tools at my org so far but this may have turned me around for OpenAI at least.

ghm2180 1y ago
Is this the security flaw thingy that stores OAuth or Auth0 tokens in sqllite database with overly permissive read privileges on it?
- zmmmmm 1y ago
  no I'm talking about the general concept of having ChatGPT passively able to read sensitive data / browser session state. Apart from the ever present risk they suck your data in for training, the threat of prompt injection or model inversion to steal secrets or execute transactions without your knowledge is extreme.
  - Terr_ 1y ago
    Right, the software is inherently a flaming security risk even if the vendor were perfectly trustworthy and moral. Well, unless the scenario is moot because such a vendor would never have released it in the first place.
vitorgrs 1y ago
I mean... Edge already have copilot integrated for years, and Edge actually have users, unlike Atlas. Not sure why people are getting shocked now...
- therein 1y ago
  Microsoft calls everything copilot. It is unclear what they had back then under that name, and what they will have under it.

jwpapi 1y ago

I normally dont waste a lot of energy on politics. But this feels truly dystopian. We here on HN are all in our bubble, we know that AI responses are very prone to error and just great in mimicking. We can differentiate when to use and when not (more or less), but when I talk to non-tech people in a normal city not close to a tech hub, most of them treat ChatGPT as the all-knowing factual instance. They have no idea of the concious and unconcious bias on the responses, based on how we ask the questions. Unfortunately I think these are the majority of the people. If you combine all that with a shady Silicon Valley CEO under historical pressure to make OpenAI profitable after 64 billion in funding, regularly flirting with the US president, it seems always consequential to me that exactly what the author described is the goal. No matter the cost. As we all feel like AI progress is stagnating and mainly the production cost to get AI responses is going down, this almost seems like the only out for OpenAI to win.

khtbunkncbuc 1y ago

[dead]

Ethan312 1y ago

Atlas feels more like a task tool than a browser. It’s fast, but we might lose the open web experience for convenience.

roundatlas 1y ago

What now remains is, after hearing glowing feedback, Satya making this the default browser in Windows as part of Microsoft and OpenAI's next chapter.

rich_sasha 1y ago

The SV playbook is to create a product, make it indispensable and monopolise it. Microsoft did it with office software. Payment companies want to be monopolies. Social media are of course the ultimate monopolies - network effects mean there is only one winner. So I guess the only logical next step for Big AI is to destroy the web, once they have squeezed every last bit out of it. Or at least make it dependent on them. Who needs news sites when OpenAI can do it? Why blog - just prompt your BlogLLM with an idea. Why comment on blogs - your agent will do it for you. All while avoid child porn with 97% accuracy - somerhing human curated content surely cannot be trusted to do. So I am 0% surprised.

bazmattaz 1y ago
I’m not sure. I think we’ll live through a few years of AI slop before human created content becomes very popular again. I imagine a future where websites (like news outlets or blogs) will have something like a “100% human created” label on it. It will be a mark of pride for them to show off and they’ll attract users because of it

snorbleck 1y ago

This is amazing. My entire web browser session state for every private and personal website I sign onto every day will be used for training data. It's great! I love this. This is exactly the direction humans should be going in to not self-destruct. The future is looking bright, while the light in our brains dims to eventual darkness. Slowly. Tragically. And for what purpose exactly. So cool.

andrethegiant 1y ago
I have no plans in downloading Atlas either, but I think your browsing isn't used for training unless you opt in. > By default, we don’t use the content you browse to train our models. If you choose to opt-in this content, you can enable “include web browsing” in your data controls settings. Note, even if you opt into training, webpages that opt out of GPTBot, will not be trained on. https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-atlas/
- gtsop 1y ago
  [dead]
- McDyver 1y ago
  Until the next update, when they conveniently have a "bug" that enables it by default
  - drusepth 1y ago
    The classic Brave approach!
BrenBarn 1y ago
"You're absolutely right!"
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
1y ago

adas4044 1y ago

Wow! Amazing post! You really nailed the complexities of AI browsers in ways that most people don't think about. I think there's also a doom paradox where if more people search with AI, this disincentives people from posting on their own blog and websites where incentives are usually ads could help support them. If AI is crawling and then spitting back information from your blog (you get no revenue), is there a point to post at all?

survirtual 1y ago
The point to posting anything is to share with your fellow kind new knowledge that lifts them, entertains them, or teaches them. If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. How sad.
- driese 1y ago
  > If you post for ad revenue, I truly feel sorry for you. I think this is a bit dismissive towards people who create content because they enjoy doing it but also could not do it to this level without the revenue, like many indie Youtubers.
  - Levitz 1y ago
    If I could press a button and remove money from the internet, I'd do it in a heartbeat. I absolutely do enjoy content that is financed through ads. I really, REALLY do like some of the stuff, honest. But it is also the case that the internet has been turning into a marketing hellscape for the last couple decades, we've gotten to a point in which engagement is optimized to such a degree that society itself is hurting from it. Politically and psychologically. The damage is hard to quantify, yet I can't fathom the opportunity cost not being well into the billions. We'd be better off without that.
- adas4044 1y ago
  "If you post for ad revenue" but recognize that a lot of creatives need to ad revenue to support themselves.

BrenBarn 1y ago

The thing about command lines is off base, but overall the article is right that the ickiness of this thing is exceeded only by its evil.

maxdo 1y ago

Every professional involved in saas, web , online content creation thinks the web is a beautiful thing. In reality the fact of social media means web failed long time ago, and it only serves a void not taken by mobile apps , and now llm agents. Why do I need to read everything about tailor Swift on you her web site , if I don’t know a single song of her ? ( I actually do ) . I don’t want a screaming website tells me about her best new album ever , and her tours if LLM knows I don’t like pop music . The other way around if you like her you’d like a different set of information. Website can do that for you

brendoelfrendo 1y ago

Atlas confuses me. Firefox already puts Claude or ChatGPT in my sidebar and has integrations so I can have it analyze or summarize content or help me with something on the page. Atlas looks like yet another Chromium fork that should have been a browser extension, not a revolutionary product that will secure OpenAI's market dominance.

coffeefirst 1y ago
Yep. I was playing around with both Atlas and Comet and, security and privacy issues aside, I can’t figure out what they’re for or what the point is. Except one: it gives them the default search engine and doesn’t let you change it. I asked Atlas about this and it told me that’s true, the AI features are just a hook, this is about lock in. Make of that what you will.
h4ck_th3_pl4n3t 1y ago
It is not a fork, and it is a NewTab page Chrome extension. They didn't even change the codename that's displayed in the Settings page.

labrador 1y ago

I tested Google Search, Google Gemini and Claude with "Taylor Swift showgirl". Gemini and Claude gave me a description plus some links. Both were organized better than the Google search page. If I didn't like the description that Claude or Google gave me I could click on the Wikipedia link. Claude gave me a link to Spotify to listen while Gemini gave me a link to YouTube to watch and lisen. The complaint about the OpenAI browser seems to be it didn't show any links. I agree, that is a big problem. If you are just getting error prone AI output then it's pretty worthless.

consp 1y ago
Google search is an ad platform. Wait until the honeymoon days of the "AI" LLMs are over for the enshitification to ensue.
- djmips 1y ago
  Ain't that the truth... I hope that "AI" LLMs will have their Linux, their local private versions that are on par.

r_singh 1y ago

At this point, my adoption of AI tools is motivated by fear of missing out or being left behind. I’m a self-taught programmer running my own SaaS. I have memory and training enabled. What I can objectively say about Atlas is that I’ve been using it and I’m hooked. It’s made me roughly twice as productive — I solved a particular problem in half the time because Atlas made it easy to discover relevant information and make it actionable. That said, affording so much control to a single company does make me uneasy.

r_singh 1y ago
Not sure why this got downvoted, but to clarify what I meant: With my repo connected via the GitHub app, I asked Atlas about a problem I was facing. After a few back-and-forth messages, it pointed me to a fork I might eventually have found myself — but only after a lot more time and trial-and-error. Maybe it was luck, but being able to attach files, link context from connected apps, and search across notes and docs in one place has cut a lot of friction for me.

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mediumsmart 1y ago

this website is mentioned best on Atlas Browser 25A362 in 1920x1080 resolution

frgturpwd 1y ago

Am I missing something here? I used it a few days ago and it does actually act like a web browser and give me the link. This seems to be a UI expectation issue rather than a "real philosophy".

kkarpkkarp 1y ago

Reposting on Bluesky. I like anti-web phrase. I think it will be a next phase after all those web 2.0 and web x.0 things. https://bsky.app/profile/kkarpieszuk.bsky.social/post/3m4cxfjn7wc2y https://bsky.app/profile/kkarpieszuk.bsky.social/post/3m4cxf...

hollowturtle 1y ago

Tangent but related, if only google search would do a serious come back instead of not finding nothing anymore, we would have a tool to compare ai to. Sure gemini integration might still be a thing but with actual working search results

tigroferoce 1y ago
You should try Kagi for this experience.

ValveFan6969 1y ago

>I had typed "Taylor Swift" in a browser, and the response had literally zero links to Taylor Swift's actual website. If you stayed within what Atlas generated, you would have no way of knowing that Taylor Swift has a website at all. Sounds like the browser did you a favor. Wonder if she'll be suing.

andy_ppp 1y ago

Another edition of “if it’s free you are their product”…

r_singh 1y ago
It’s not entirely free though, agent mode and a few other features are paid. I’m paying OpenAI $200/mo for my subscription

k__ 1y ago

They gotta do this. If they don't put AI in every tool, they won't get new training data.

PeterStuer 1y ago

People are misinterpreting the gui/cli thing. There's 2 dimensions to it: determinism and discoverability. In the Adventure example, the ux is fully deterministic but not discoverable. Unless you know what the correct incantation is, there is no inherent way to discover it besides trial and error. Most cli's are like that (and imho phones with 'gestures' are even worse). That does not make a cli inefficient, unproductive or bad. I use cli all the time as I'm sure Anhil does, it just makes them more difficult to approach for the novice. But the second aspect of Atlas is its non determinism. There is no 'command' that predictivly always 'works'. You can engineer towards phrasings that are more often successfull, but you can't reach fidelity. This leeway is not without merrit. In theory the system is thus free to 'improve' over time without the user needing to. That is something you might find desirable or not.

latexr 1y ago
> In theory the system is thus free to 'improve' over time without the user needing to. It could just as well degrade, improvement is not the only path.
joeiq 1y ago
Yes, agreed! Autocomplete, or search suggestions, is the ultimate discoverability feature of the typing interaction.
IshKebab 1y ago
Exactly. Equating CLI and LLM text input is completely wrong. Hard to see past that huge mistake. Although there is one aspect in which the LLM interface still isn't discoverable - what interface does it have to the world. Can I asked Alexa+ to send a WhatsApp? I have no idea because it depends if the programmers gave it that interface.

falcor84 1y ago

It really lost me at >There were a tiny handful of incredible nerds who thought this was fun, mostly because 3D graphics and the physical touch of another human being hadn't been invented yet. I can barely stomach it with John Oliver does it, but reading this sort of snark without hearing a British voice is too much for me.

kleiba 1y ago
Also, re: "a tiny handful of incredible nerds" - page 20 of this [0] document lists the sales figures for Infocom titles from 1981 to 1986: it sums up to over 2 million shipped units. Granted, that number does not equal the number "nerds" who played the games because the same player will probably have bought multiple titles if they enjoyed interactive fiction. However, also keep in mind that some of the games in that table were only available after 1981, i.e., at a later point during the 1981-1986 time frame. Also, the 80s were a prime decade for pirating games, so more people will have played Infocom titles than the sales figures suggest - the document itself mentions this because they sold hint books for some titles separately. [0] https://ia601302.us.archive.org/1/items/InfocomCabinetMiscSalesData/Infocom_Cabinet_Misc_Sales_Data.pdf https://ia601302.us.archive.org/1/items/InfocomCabinetMiscSa...

anthk 1y ago

>Sorry, I can't do that. 'Modern' Z-Machine games (v5 version compared to the original v3 one from Infocom) will allow you to do that and far more. By 'modern' I meant from the early 90's and up. Even more with v8 games. >This was also why people hated operating systems like MS-DOS, and why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface. The original v3 Z Machine parser (raw one) was pretty much limited compared to the v5 one. Even more with against the games made with Inform6 and the Inform6 English library targetting the v5 version. Go try yourself. Original Zork from MIT (Dungeon) converted into a v5 ZMachine game: https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fifarchive.org%2Fif-archive%2Fgames%2Fzcode%2Fzdungeon.z5 https://iplayif.com/?story=https%3A%2F%2Fifarchive.org%2Fif-... Spot the differences. For instance, you could both say 'take the rock' and, later, say 'drop it'. >take mat Taken. >drop it Dropped. >take the mat Taken. >drop mat Dropped. >open mailbox You open the mailbox, revealing a small leaflet. >take leaftlet You can't see any such thing. >take leaflet Taken. >drop it Dropped. Now, v5 games are from late 80's/early 90's. There's Curses, Jigsaw, Spider and Web ... v8 games are like Anchorhead, pretty advanced for its time: https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7 https://ifdb.org/viewgame?id=op0uw1gn1tjqmjt7 You can either download the Z8 file and play it with Frotz (Linux/BSD), WinFrotz, or Lectrote under Android and anything else. Also, online with the web interpreter. Now, the 'excuses' about the terseness of the original Z3 parser are now nearly void; because with Puny Inform a lot of Z3 targetting games (for 8086 DOS PC's, C64's, Spectrums, MSX'...) have a slightly improved parser against the original Zork game.

danielfalbo 1y ago

I don't think the CLI one is a good analogy. > We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason Man I still love command-line so much > And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first. [...] guess what secret spell they had to type into their computer to get actual work done Well... docs and the "-h" do a pretty good job.

motoxpro 1y ago
The games he is talking about deliberately didn't have docs or help because that WAS the game, to guess. I think same here, while there are docs "please show me the correct way to do X," the surface area is so large the the analogy holds up still, in that you might as well just be guessing fo rhte right command.

hereme888 1y ago

> The fake web page had no information newer than two or three weeks old. What irks me the most about LLMs is when they lie about having followed your instructions to browse a site. And they keep lying, over and over again. For whatever reason, the ONE model that consistently does this is Gemini.

f4uCL9dNSnQm 1y ago

Speaking of anti-web: https://i.postimg.cc/br7F8NLd/chat-GPT.png https://i.postimg.cc/br7F8NLd/chat-GPT.png I wonder when webmasters will take theirs gloves off and just start feeding AI crawlers with porn and gore.

101008 1y ago
This would be amazing. Such a shame it would only work if a large percentage does it.

darthnebula 1y ago

Yes, if I type Taylor Swift Showgirls I get some helpful information and a lot of links, but not her website. It isn't very different than what Google Gemini displays at the top of Google search results. Is it a webpage? Well... it displays in a browser... But if I type Taylor Swift, I get links to her website, instagram, facebook, etc. Is it a webpage? Well... it displays in a browser... This isn't Web 2.0, Anil. Things change.

bagacrap 1y ago
I despise the AI mode in Google and wish I could turn it off, but at least traditional results are just below it. > Well... it displays in a browser... Yes, a slop browser.

visarga 1y ago

One deal breaker for me - TTS (select and speak) is broken. It does not read the selected text.

amelius 1y ago

It's bad news if one company owns the search bar. Just like it's bad news if one company owns the roads or the telecom infrastructure. Governments need to prepare some strong regulation here. (Of course this is still true if it's not strictly a monopoly)

trashb 1y ago

> And it would go on like this for hours while you tried in vain to guess what the hell it wanted you to type, or you discovered the outdoors, whichever came first. The part about Zork doesn't make sense to me. As I understand it text based adventure games are actually quite lenient with the input you can give, multiple options for the same action. Additionally certain keywords are "industry standard" in the same way that you walk using "wasd" in FPS games, so much that it became the title of the documentary "get lamp". Due to the players perceived knowledge of similar mechanics in other games you can even ague that providing these familiar commands is part of the game design. It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard. Projects like 1964's ELIZA prove that text based interfaces have been able to feel natural for a long time. Text has a high information density, but natural language is a notoriously bad interface for certain things. Like giving commands, therefore we invented command lines with different syntax and programming languages for instructing computers what to do.

mpalmer 1y ago
It seems to me that the author never played a text based adventure game and is jut echoing whatever he heard Indeed. And this makes his judgmental pettiness about people who like these games all the shittier for it. I don't know why extremely-online bloggers think unrequited snark is a glide path to being funny.
- kamranjon 1y ago
  I loved text based adventure games when I was growing up, but I also thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny. I’m a bit surprised people are so offended by this article, have we lost the ability to read something with nuance?
  - mpalmer 1y ago
    It's a bit weasel-y to refer to criticism as just "people being offended". > thought this comparison was incredibly apt and also found it very funny I'm happy for you, but I didn't. To "read something with nuance" is to be open to nuance that is already present in the writing. This writing is not nuanced! Perhaps you're asking us to make an effort to be more tolerant of weak writing. That's a fair request when the writer is acting in good faith. But to mock nerds for liking text adventures when you clearly do not like them yourself is not acting in good faith.

anymouse123456 1y ago

I can't speak to the particular browser application. I haven't installed it and probably never will, but the language around text interfaces makes the OP sound... uninformed. Graphical applications can be more beautiful and discoverable, but they limit the user to only actions the authors have implemented and deployed. Text applications are far more composable and expressive, but they can be extremely difficult to discover and learn. We didn't abandon the shell or text interfaces. Many of us happily live in text all day every day. There are many tasks that suffer little by being limited and benefit enormously by being discoverable. These are mostly graphical now. There are many tasks that do not benefit much by spatial orientation and are a nightmare when needlessly constrained. These tasks benefit enormously by being more expressive and composable. These are still often implemented in text. The dream is to find a new balance between these two modes and our recent advances open up new territory for exploring where they converge and diverge.

whilenot-dev 1y ago
Am I the only one that interpreted OP in a way that they weren't opposed to neither CLIs, TUIs, nor GUIs at all? The topic wasn't "textual interface VS graphical interface", but "undocumented/natural language VS documented/query language" for navigating the internet. In addition to the analogy of the textual interface used in Zork, we could say that it'd be like interacting with any REST API without knowledge about its specification - guessing endpoints, methods, and parameters while assuming best practices (of "natural-ness" kind). Do we really want to explore an API like that, through naive hacking? Does a natural language wrapper make this hacking any better? It can make it more fun as it breaks patterns, sure, but is that really what we want?
- anymouse123456 1y ago
  I'm not focused on this particular browser or the idea of using LLMs as a locus of control. I haven't used it and have no intention of using it. I'm reacting to the OP articulating clearly dismissive and incorrect claims about text-based applications in general. As one example, a section is titled with: > We left command-line interfaces behind 40 years ago for a reason This is immediately followed by an anecdote that is probably true for OP, but doesn't match my recollection at all. I recall being immersed and mesmerized by Zork. I played it endlessly on my TRS-80 and remember the system supporting reasonable variation in the input commands. At any rate, it's strange to hold up text based entertainment applications while ignoring the thousands of text based tools that continue to be used daily. They go on with hyperbolic language like: > ...but people were thrilled to leave command-line interfaces behind back in the 1990s It's 2025. I create and use GUI applications, but I live in the terminal all day long, every day. Many of us have not left the command line behind and would be horrified if we had to. It's not either/or, but the OP makes incorrect claims that text based interfaces are archaic and have long been universally abandoned. They have not, and at least some of us believe we're headed toward a new golden age of mixed mode (Text & GUI) applications in the not-so-distant future.

kopochameleon 1y ago

Same author's impact on web preservation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44064230

kristianc 1y ago
He's a great talker. Delivery record more mixed.
- arresin 1y ago
  What’s your beef with him?

glitchc 1y ago

It sounds like a great opportunity to poison the well. Create a bot farm that points the browser to every dank and musty corner of the web ad naseum: Old Yahoo, Myspace and Geocities pages, 4chan, 8chan, etc. Let's flood the system with junk and watch it implode.

kristianc 1y ago

Dash’s entire identity is bound up with narrating technology by translating its cultural shifts into moral parables. His record at actually building things is, at best, spotty. Now the LLM takes that role by absorbing, it summarising, editorialising. And like Winer, he often reads like a guy who has never really made peace with the modern era and who isn't content to declare the final draft of history unless it's had his fingerprints on it. The machine is suddenly the narrator, and it doesn’t cite him. When he calls Atlas “anti-web,” he’s really saying it is “anti-author”. In a way though, how much do we need people to narrate these shifts for us? Isn't the point of these technologies that we are able to do things for ourselves rather than rely on mediators to interpret it for us? If he can be outcompeted by LLMs, does that not just show how shallow his shtick is?

tolerance 1y ago
I think you’re on to something. In a way this is just the postmodern ethos of the web collapsing in on itself.

speak_plainly 1y ago

I opened ChatGPT on my Mac this morning and there was an update. I updated ChatGPT and a little window popped up asking me to download Atlas. I declined as I already have it downloaded. There was another window, similar to the update available window, in my chat asking me to download Atlas again...I went to hit the 'X' to close it and I somehow triggered it, it opened my browser to the Atlas page and triggered a download of Atlas. This was not cool and has further shaken my already low confidence in OpenAI.

georgefrowny 1y ago
The only confidence I have in OpenAI at this point is that they will be using scummy tricks like that all the time. What have they ever done to earn confidence in the other direction? They can't even lie and blame it on a programming fuckup because they'd have to say AI driven code is buggy.
pjc50 1y ago
I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI.
- Sharlin 1y ago
  All the other similar cases I can think of are either something universally vilified, like aggressive telemarketers, or outright scams. AI firms are in a good company it seems.
- 52-6F-62 1y ago
  There is a giant, glowing, screaming and shouting reason why and yet everyone pretends it's a mystery still.
- burnte 1y ago
  > I don't think I've ever encountered a technology pushed quite as hard on unwilling users as AI. That's why they have to push it so hard. They spent a lot of money on it and they NEED us to buy it so they don't take a loss, so their tactic is to try to force it on us. It happens to many companies, you start a disruptor and get huge because you did what the market wanted and competitors didn't. Then, later, you don't want the market to go in a direction, so you try to stack the market, never once realizing that another disruptor will come along to upset your apple cart. You can control some of the market all of the time, and all of the market some of the time, but you can't control all of the market all of the time.

kwa32 1y ago

how is this different from just training on your history

kingkawn 1y ago

People didn’t hate DOS it just was what it was

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

strikefo 1y ago

I think Atlas sounds and acts pretty terrible, but the Dia browser has been a pretty nice experience for me. You still have access to the web, favorite links in the sidebar, etc.; and the option (when you want or need) to "chat" with the current website you are on using an LLM.

Levitating 1y ago

I am still confused in what way this is "anti-web". Is it actually harming the current web, or just providing a bad interface to it? > The amount of data they're gathering is unfathomable. The author suggests that GPT continuously reads information like typed keystrokes etc, I don't see why that's implied. And it wouldn't be new either, with tools like Windows Replay.

soiltype 1y ago
> I don't see why that's implied Because "it wouldn't be new either, with tools like Windows Replay". Genuinely, why would they leave any data on the table if they don't have to? That's the entire purpose of the browser.
- Levitating 1y ago
  > Genuinely, why would they leave any data on the table if they don't have to? That's the entire purpose of the browser. Because extracting and using that data may not be trivial, practically and legally speaking. I am sure they use the chat input you send them for training. But to say that they transfer all the websites you visit to their servers, or that they can monitor your keyboard input either by continuously streaming your window or your keyboard events to their servers. All of that would be a small technical feat and noticeable in the created traffic. My belief is that they simply hacked together an AI web-browser in the least amount of time with the least amount of effort, so that they can showcase another use for AI. That would be a much simpler explanation than them building a personal surveillance tool that wants to know what you've typed and keeps track of the time you've spent looking for shoes.

PaulHoule 1y ago

One could make the case that the web of 2025 is anti-human. AI clients are one of very few exits we have from enshittification. ChatGPT can read all the ads so you don’t have to. The whole point of those annoying CAPTCHAs and those stupidity anime girls on all the kernel web sites is slamming the door from any exit from Google’s world that we live in.

hermitcrab 1y ago

'Atlas' as in 'Atlas Shrugged' by any chance? If so, ugh.

oldestofsports 1y ago

”why even all the Linux users reading this right now are doing so in a graphical user interface.” I read this in my TUI RSS reader lol

karaterobot 1y ago

The headline is incorrect, it should say "A Browser That's Anti-Web". Many other browsers are also trying to destroy the web for their own benefit, including some you may have heard of.

bradgessler 1y ago

I’m surprised 1Password isn’t trying to get into this game. Imagine a browser that lets people define sandboxes and scope credential that an LLM may access to complete certain tasks? I’d love to have a browser download all of my utility bills for taxes. I’d setup a browser, limit it to a few URLs, give it access to a few credentials, and then let it rip.

thetrees 1y ago

Condensed version: 'OpenAI built a browser that mostly benefits OpenAI. Instead, they should have built a browser that mostly benefits the customer (and, thus, benefits OpenAI less).' Welcome to capitalism. I wish it wasn't like this, but this is the system we have. If you want OpenAI to do things differently, another company has to do it differently, show that doing it differently is even more profitable (see Apple and their privacy angle), and force OpenAI to change for competitive reasons. Or figure out some way to trick our way into a constitutional convention so we can change the system.

pranavvishnu 1y ago

Hi - Pranav from the ChatGPT Atlas team here. Appreciate the discussion and feedback here. Just wanted to correct a few specifics so there’s no confusion: - We have tried to make Atlas a great way to browse the open web, and invested heavily in the search experience as we covered in the livestream. When I test typing “taylor swift" into Atlas I see links to the website in the autocomplete carousel, at the top of the results page, in inline citations within chat, and in the Search tab. We’re also working on making these faster and more prominent when we’re sure you want a link, for ex. you’ll see a large vertical list of links at the top of the chat response when you type in something like “gmail”. - Browser memories are opt-in, and by default we don’t train on the contents of pages you browse—even when memories are enabled. Keeping the Ask ChatGPT sidebar open has no bearing on what gets sent to us. Webpages are clearly displayed as attachments you can disable in the chat, and only sent to us when you submit the prompts. - Ask ChatGPT and Agent mode are not workarounds to user or publisher training settings. Even if a user has training enabled, we will still respect publisher preferences to block GPTBot in their robots.txt and do not train on that content.

rgun 1y ago
This is akin to saying "We are not evil, today"
- bagacrap 1y ago
  "we are not evil, we are one default away from being evil!"
  - bagacrap 1y ago
    Haha, wait, the training directly on websites is off by default, but if you use browser memories, training on that is on by default. Browser memories contain arbitrary amounts of information from websites... Anil's point is that Chatgpt can't, on its own, train on data that requires a login. So Atlas is in fact automating training on login-walled content, and doing so by default, but also adding decoy settings that make you think it's not. No evil here!