I Am Still Not Quite Sure What an AI Browser is For

So I’ve been switching between OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas and The Browser Company’s (Atlassian’s) Dia for about a week now and I still really am not quite sure what the whole idea here is.

Like it’s nice that I can just kinda use ChatGPT when I need to, but can also quickly jump between different search engines. Atlas also has the ability to return the web links, images, news, etc. that we’re accustomed to on traditional search engines. But even then…I’m still not quite sure what to actually use this for in day-to-day life.

If you listen to the companies on what the benefits are it’s that most everything you do these days is on the web—Google Workspace is on the web, Notion’s on the web, hell, even Office is on the web these days (though it’s admittedly…not the greatest). Most of the tools we use in our daily lives are done through a browser. This means that the place that’s going to be able to have the most context around what we do in our day is going to be the browser.

So I’ve been sitting here, using these browsers for days on end and…I still don’t know what this AI is going to be used for. Like, AI is integrated into all of these tools, Notion AI knows all about my Notion stuff, ChatGPT doesn’t. I still don’t see why the browser itself needs to have AI. Is it for shopping? That’s…an okay use case and I’ve definitely used tools like ChatGPT to get me to do, but I don’t really see how that’s going to revolutionize the browser space.

I don’t know about all of you, but just because I’m using web tools for a lot of my daily life doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m constantly using a web browser for all of this kind of stuff. I’m writing in the Notion client that’s based on Electron, I’m using the Discord, Linear, and Figma Electron clients as well. Where’s the benefit of an AI browser there? I’m still using the web tools, but not a browser in the traditional sense of the word.

It’s all over the place, I’m interested to see where all of these ideas land, but I still think something more like what we see with Arc and Zen seems like it’s going to be the better way of getting people to use an AI browser.

The whole point of Arc was to build a place that was made for these web apps. I find that while I’m using Arc, I’m more inclined to use the websites than going with the web-wrapped versions of the apps, which means that it’s more likely that I’m going to be the right kind of user for an AI browser with that kind of browser paradigm.