The Browser of the Future
How Google can take the harness off its AI tech to change the way we work.
In the center of Google’s main corporate campus stands an imposing T-Rex Fossil named Stan. The rumor is that Stan presides over the company as a constant reminder that the ‘dinosaur companies’ eventually go extinct. The Dinosaurs are fierce and powerful, but old. They are undone by their own stability, which breeds complacency amid perpetually changing times. Having amassed the power and sustainability of a dinosaur (and having lost its pioneering founders) Google now stands at the precipice: will it sink slowly to the beat of its own bureaucracy? Or will the fire of what was once called Silicon Valley spring innovation eternal?
For context, I interned at Google this summer, and I learned a lot about what it is and isn’t. For starters, Mountain View is not composed of mountains, and is instead a vast suburbia (with some charm).
What caught me most off-guard about the way the business is run is how much they truly respect their users. Each engineer, at least on my team, cared deeply about each and every user experience. And not only in the context of their perception or use of the product, but genuinely about the product improving the user’s state of being, of living. If Google does become a dinosaur, they will do so with dignity. They do not fear death; they have too much money for that. They only fear making something that is not useful, and ultimately deteriorating the brand and spirit of the company.
At this point, it is clear that an ads-based internet works. It allows almost half the world’s population access to high quality services at no cost. The problem for ads serving companies (Google, Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) is that they are really in the market for attention, and humans are fickle creatures. Worse, they’re running out of users to gain. On top of that, the startup cost for creating a product like Google or Facebook today is dramatically lower than it was 20 years ago. The result is ever increasing competition for a piece of a pie whose growth is slowing to a creep.
Fortunately for Google, they do innovate on many other fronts. They are among the strongest AI companies in the world and they have an up-and-coming cloud business that sits close to consumers. And then, they have their secret weapon: Google Chrome.
Browsers are extremely counterintuitive in terms of business-sense. They are never sold, run no ads, and are very complicated and expensive to produce. Not to mention that they require vigilant security and constant innovation to remain popular. The most simple way to explain the power of the browser is to think about how you get to the internet: you pay for Wi-fi, you buy a laptop, and then you download a browser. There are exactly three companies with control over the pixels on your screen, and the browser is the only one with the leverage of a pure-software product. All you have to do is convince people to install the browser, and you steal all of the default-setting advantages of everyone who came before you. And despite almost all computers shipping with either Safari or Microsoft Edge, 65% of people go out of their way to install Google Chrome.
Google knows how important Chrome is, and you’ve likely seen their ads everywhere for it. Because Apple and Microsoft can remove Google’s everything from their hardware products, but they will never take away people’s favorite browser, and that’s where they have all the power to turn everything into a google search. Of course, this position is just as defensible as advertising, with tightening competition, and a problem of high activation cost for acquiring ever-so-fickle users. To avoid descending into extinction, I believe Google has to leverage its browser marketshare with its AI and cloud strength.
There is a change that I have written extensively about regarding AI and its scaling laws. Essentially, AI and specifically large transformer models are becoming extremely good at repeating human-like patterns. This obviously has implications extending far beyond a conversation about Google or technology. But for them specifically, it is an opportunity to change the way that people interact with their computers.
No other company controls nearly as much frequently used on-device software, or has the AI capabilities of Google. Making chrome a deeply AI-rooted product could change the way we interact with computers, and secure chrome (and hence, Google) as a winner for many years to come.
There is another trend that places chrome in the perfect position to leverage google’s resources to become a deeply innovative and necessary product: the increasing complexity of browser activity.
Crypto people will fight me on this, but I think that the real ‘web3’ is about editing, not ownership. For context, web1 traditionally refers to a read-only internet (think wikipedia), and web2 traditionally refers to a read-write internet (think youtube). But what about editing and working on the internet, instead of just uploading and reading finished products. Google knows about this trend and largely started it with sheets, docs, and slides, which remove what once were individual software packages and integrate them into the internet, where they can be edited from anywhere, by anyone. But this trend has accelerated beyond just docs. Nowadays, UI is made on the web with Figma, code is written on Repl.it, and teachers do not just upload grades, but administer tests themselves on the internet. The pandemic work-from-home trend has merely accelerated this change; no place, besides maybe an office, is as collaborative as the internet.
For google to take advantage of these trends, it has to go meta (no pun intended). They must make Chrome a uniquely productive browser. They must leverage the world’s information that they have so tirelessly organized, and put it to work for users. There are many ways that this can be done. Autocomplete in Gmail and Docs is definitely a step in the right direction, but what’s a step in a marathon? I believe that chrome has to fully embrace the new class of AI models that can understand natural language and generate action based on this language.
Language is the perfect interface for chrome, because it is already based on language. The largest non-changing part of a chrome browser is already a text input field. But what if the search bar could be used for purposes besides navigation? What if it could interact with the page itself to do things that were smart and productive?
Large, transformer based models have already demonstrated the ability to generate text and images based on text input. Moreover, Google is the owner of some of the best models for these exact purposes. A website-agnostic, built in AI language-interface would give Chrome an edge above competition, but more than that, it would revolutionize the way we use the internet and do work in general. And maybe the technology is not quite ready to work on every website, but even launching known, predictable products on a few websites (docs, for example) would drastically reduce the amount of user re-education that would have to occur as AI matures across other domains and tools like this become more available and predictable.
In fact, I believe Google’s ability to minimally and slowly roll out such a feature is its absolute biggest advantage in brining this product to life. A simple icon and coloring distinction in the suggested results popup could indicate web actions, rather than search results. Embedding such information into the results tab isn’t necessarily a new change, either, with results currently being embedded on some searches. From the user standpoint, there is near zero buy-in for instant productivity improvements.
A potential issue on the horizon for this type of software is that — at least based on current constraints — it can likely not be as cheaply served as the rest of the internet. A single pass through a state of the art language model requires on the order of 100 billion floating point operations. This isn’t an impossible hurdle to deploying the software in general (Moore’s law has been working remarkably well, thankfully), but it may be prohibitive to deploying such a tool on in a free, ad-supported way.
I view this not as an obstacle for Google, but an opportunity to change their incentives. Google’s current customer is ultimately not users, advertisers pay the bills, not searchers. And while there is overlap in the needs of users and advertisers, prioritizing users would allow Google to lean more solidly into its foundational mission of being useful to everyday people. What began as a place to search for web pages has grown into a place to search for information. And advertisers often aren’t as good at providing information as they are at providing web pages. But justifying a paid/subscription service with across-the-board AI integration into everyday work would allow them to wean off advertiser incentives, even if just slightly.
Whenever I write anything, I constantly google. I google words, I verify things I remember, etc. I’d say that in only about 1 in 3 of those searches do I actually need to leave Google. I’m sure Google knows this, so why do they automatically send you to an entire web page when you press enter in the search bar when you only want a morsel of information? Because if you make 66% less queries, you are seeing 66% less ads. A user-centric model (paid, if need be) eliminates this problem, and generates more value for the user.
I imagine that someone who is less of an AI fanboy might be skeptical of the usefulness of a permanent browser-level presence. So here are 6 ‘action queries’ if you will that I believe are fully possible to implement today:
- “Write an outline for an essay on [insert prompt]” — Google Docs
- “Make a chart out of this information” — Google Sheets
- “Paste in the top column all of the imdb ratings for the top 100 movies, and put in the second row the release date of the movies, and then make a chart out of that information” — Google Sheets
- “Write an email to my coworkers telling them that I’m sick and can’t come in today” — Gmail
- “Design me some UI for a note taking app” — Figma
- “Book me the cheapest airline ticket to X possible” — Google Flights
In terms of implementing these actions, I imagine that initially, they would have to be done one at a time (possibly with contribution from app developers themselves). But another piece of Google’s unique competitive advantage in making such a product is access to web browser interactions. It could be conceived that this data (fully and carefully anonymized, of course) could eventually be used to train such a model to learn the patterns of web interaction, and conduct them from a text based prompt input.
There is also the work being done at Adept.AI to connect AI to APIs across the internet. Such a product integrated to not just the google homepage, but the browser itself, has the potential to radically change how work is done.
We live in a very exciting time in that the many now have access to what was only available to the few. One consequence of this is that the most resourceful of us are now sufficiently resourced to take on seemingly impossible challenges. This is what gives me confidence that, if Google doesn’t build out this infinitely more productive future, some other company just might. Regardless of who does it, I’m excited to watch it and be a part of it.
