Om Malik: “Josh Miller, co-founder of The Browser Company, is making “Arc,” a browser for the AI-first era. He believes that there is less of a need for the user interface of the browser of the past, but the internals of the browser are going to be pivotal for our future. “While most think we are building a browser,” Miller said in a conversation, “what we are building is a browser-based system.” He wants to transform the browser from a mere viewer to an operating system-like entity that maintains personal preferences and behaviors at the system level, allowing us to use “AI” across devices without replicating our choices at the app level. His new browser-based OS will understand user context and preferences at a fundamental level, making it easier to create personalized experiences. Rather than having applications dictate how we interact with information, our usage patterns and preferences will shape how information and services are presented to us. Miller believes the web browser’s core technologies, especially those that are open and widely adopted standards, make it easy for browsers to evolve quickly and adapt to a future where we will interact with multiple devices — not just desktop or laptop computers, or mobile phones. After all, wearables and devices without screens will need to browse, retrieve, and interact with information without the need for a browser as we know it.”
GroupM’s 2024 Global End-of-Year Forecast. FT: “The global advertising industry will surpass $1tn in revenue for the first time this year, with Google, Meta, ByteDance, Amazon and Alibaba expected to earn more than half the total in a market dominated by the technology sector. GroupM, the media agency owned by WPP, estimates that global advertising revenue will increase 9.5 per cent in 2024, more than it had expected at the mid-year point, despite tough economic conditions in larger, developed markets such as the US and UK. The group forecasts that the market will expand by a further 7.7 per cent in 2025, and that most of the growth will directly benefit the largest sellers of digital advertising in the US tech sector, rather than providers of marketing services such as advertising agencies…Digital advertising is forecast to account for 73 per cent of total revenue by the end of next year — growing at 12.4 per cent globally in 2024 and 10 per cent in 2025 — or 82 per cent when including revenue from streaming and digital newspapers and magazines.”
WSJ: “Founded in 2020, Viam is built on the premise that anything can be made “smart,” through the combination of its software platform, existing hardware and AI. This includes smart refrigerators, of course, but also smart bathroom lines and even smart pizza. Many things in the physical world either generate some kind of data or are surrounded by something that does (like a security camera). Viam provides a platform to bring that data to the cloud, where it can be analyzed for insights—and sometimes managed and controlled remotely.”
The Atlantic looks beyond ChatGPT: “OpenAI is taking a long view. The reasoning models “explore different hypotheses like a human would,” Chen told me. By reasoning, o1 is proving better at understanding and answering questions about images, too, he said, and the full version of o1 now accepts multimodal inputs. The new reasoning models solve problems “much like a person would,” OpenAI wrote in September. And if scaling up large language models really is hitting a wall, this kind of reasoning seems to be where many of OpenAI’s rivals are turning next, too. Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently noted o1 as a possible way forward for AI. Google has recently released several experimental versions of Gemini, its flagship model, all of which exhibit some signs of being maze rats—taking longer to answer questions, providing detailed reasoning chains, improvements on math and coding. Both it and Microsoft are reportedly exploring this “reasoning” approach. And multiple Chinese tech companies, including Alibaba, have released models built in the style of o1.”
