Waveform: The MKBHD Podcast - Are AI Browsers the Future with Josh Miller

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Here we have it! This is the full interview with Josh Miller of The Browser Company where Marques, Andrew, and David ask him about Arc, Dia, and the future of browsers in general. Enjoy! Music provided by Epidemic Sound Shop the merch: https://shop.mkbhd.com Social: Waveform Threads: https://www.threads.net/@waveformpodcast Waveform Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/waveformpodcast/?hl=en Hosts: Marques: https://www.threads.net/@mkbhd Andrew: https://www.threads.net/@andrew_manganelli David: https://www.threads.net/@davidimel Adam: https://www.threads.net/@parmesanpapi17 Ellis: https://twitter.com/EllisRovin TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@waveformpodcast Join the Discord: https://discord.gg/mkbhd Music by 20syl: https://bit.ly/2S53xlC Waveform is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This is Peter Kafka, the host of Channels, the show about what happens when media and tech collide. And this week, I'm talking to Katie Drummond, who runs WIRED. She's found a way to breathe new life into that publication by covering news. We started covering Doge like several stories a day, every single day. And after like a week, I sort of looked around and was like, where is everyone else? That's This Week on Channels, wherever you listen to your favorite podcast. Yo, what is up people of the internet? Welcome to a bonus episode of the waveform podcast. This is a fun one a lot of you have been expecting this one because we shouted it out in our

last Friday episode where we talked briefly with Josh Miller the CEO of the browser company. This is the full unedited hour long interview which has a lot of interesting perspectives in it. It was good for all of us to get to sit down and talk to him about browsers, about Arc, about Dia, and to actually get concrete answers on some things we were wondering about. What if Google tries to do exactly what you're doing?

How will you get people who love Arc to switch to Dia and vice versa and could features bounce back and forth between them? A lot of interesting stuff. So I'll just get right into it. This is a full conversation with Josh. First of all, let's introduce you because you're the CEO of the browser company

and the browser company is a pretty self explanatory name, but break down what you do, what the company does, and then we can chat about all this stuff. Thank you so much for having me. When we started the browser company, people warned me that nobody cares about web browsers. So didn't think this is why I would be here, but it's awesome to have made it on waveform

making web browsers. So thank you for having me. We make two browsers. We make a browser called Arc, which is awesome to see on both of your screens. You probably noticed it. I appreciate it. And then a new AI browser called Dia,

which I'm excited to talk about today. Is that a reference to Dia Beacon, by the way? Naming's hard. So for one of the people, Dia Beacon had a connection to it. Dia Beacon is an art museum in Beacon, New York. Yeah. I think I remember saying a while ago, ARC is a good name too.

I do remember that. I definitely remember that. It's a good name. Yeah, and also Dia is kind of saying a while ago, Arc is a good name too. I do remember that. I definitely remember that. It's a good name. Yeah, and also Dia is kind of like a new day, a new dawn. Sure, that I agree. But man, if there's one thing that is hard at startups, naming anything and creating a logo for anything is a religious debate.

Totally fair. We got here. So, I mean, as we've talked about on this podcast, there's been like a lot of chatter in the browser world. You know, obviously we're a more niche group of people really into tech, but it just feels like there's movement with browsers and with people trying new things and new concepts

and new ideas of what the internet is and what search is. And it's all very interesting. And so I figured it would be cool to have you talk a little bit about, number one, how we got to Arc, and then number two, how you moved from Arc to Dia being the second big focus and big project. Sure, yeah, so our original observation that led to the browser company

was that it was 2019, 2020, and I was actually working at a VC firm for two years, and I was noticing that all of the kind of hot new startups that were coming in, they were all web apps for the first time. For the 10 years before that, everything I had been working on were mobile apps. And now these that were coming in. They were all web apps for the first time. For the 10 years before that, everything I had been working on were mobile apps. And now these companies are coming in

and showing these wild new reinventions of documents. Exactly. And then what struck me was every time they came in, they were in this rectangle that was Chrome and that thing hadn't changed at all in decades. But the thing that really got me excited about browsers was that observation. And then my wife got a job with a 76 year old

artist in Flagstaff, Arizona The least tech centric workplace you can imagine and I saw her in her new job She never left Chrome even in the art world, you know She got sent PDFs from the galleries and they were URLs that she opened in Chrome she spent hours and hours every day in Chrome and Myself and my co-founder and the early employees were all consumer backgrounds. People that worked at Snapchat and Instagram

were really interested in how software can touch people at scale, you know, all the people in our life. And we thought, wait a minute, browsers are one of the most consumer pieces of software imaginable. We don't think about it like that. Like the way you feel about Instagram or your iPhone,

no one cares about Chrome or Safari in that way. And so that to us felt like, oh my God, this is this dry utility that hasn't changed in two decades that you use for hours every single day. And everyone's like, yeah, I don't really have an opinion about it. Like where else in tech do you have that? So that was really the simple idea was,

okay, if our browsers are now really these effectively operating systems with our apps and files, and you don't care about it, but you're spending hours every day, what might it look like to build a piece of software that people cared so much about and made them feel good? Which kind of gets back to where I started is, people warned, they don't care.

And I think part of the reason we're here today is, now people care so much about Arc, and I'm coming on the Wig One podcast. So be careful what you wish for, I guess. Yeah, so we end up in a place where we all are super heavy tech users. And a lot of us here, I think all of us actually still use Arc, really love the browser and the product

and the features and a lot of the UI. People can scroll back to previous episodes where we've talked about it. And so it's developed a community where, yes, people do care about this web browser. And now there's this new project you're working on, which is Dia, which is super early. We've all started playing with it, and it's very different.

You've already said it's an AI-based web browser. Explain what Dia is, and then we can figure out how it exists in the world of browsers. Yeah, actually, and before getting to Dia, I'm curious. I went back and rewatched the first time David brought up Arc on this podcast. Nice. Which, I'm curious, I went back and rewatched the first time David brought up ARK on this podcast. Nice. Which by the way is embarrassing

because I had no idea how to explain it. I was like, it removes my tabs when I don't use them. ARK got introduced to this whole company because David has a tab hoarding problem and it had a feature to do that. And that was the feature that sold David off the bat. And that was only one of the features. But then it slowly grew to multiple people in the office

and it's become like a favorite. But I remember being so excited to hear that David brought it up on this podcast. And I remember watching the video and like David, I knew he knew about it and you really did stumble. I just was like, well, it does this and the tabs are on the side. It's kind of, it's weird and it's interesting

like hearing you talk about the way that people wanna have an emotional connection with their browser, because again, even something as simple as having the tabs on the side of the browser, that's something that is very native to Arc that I think a lot of people are, and we'll get into this later, I think,

but are frustrated about with DX, it's back to the Chrome experience. But yeah, it's just, there have been many things about Arc that have just got their hooks into us here at the studio. And so the reason I bring it up though is because on that podcast, you were, I would say, open-minded but very skeptical. Yes, yes, of course.

And I'm curious for you what shifted because it relates to the Dia story that we'll get to in a second, I'm sure. I think it's one of those things where I didn't care too much about the browser either. I was using Chrome and then I was switching to Safari on the laptop because the battery life was better and I was just kind of agnostic

and was willing to try something. So I tried something and I think it was a couple features that I did like, especially for whatever reason, the side tabs, it's a widescreen machine, like it just made too much sense and I just got hooked. So Arc like quickly became my home and then the syncing across devices, I just like started using Arc a lot.

Yep. Yeah. Awesome. Okay, so to answer your question about Dia and then I'm sure we can come back to that. Yeah. So they're, my personal life and professional life, I keep very separate.

You know, my personal life, it's people I went to college with, high school with, they're not in tech, They work in manufacturing or art. And I feel like in the past six months, nine months, all of them have started talking to these AI chat tools for everything in their life. My friend who works in manufacturing that I was talking about,

I was hanging out with him a couple of weekends ago, and he was saying there's not a professional project or personal chore that he does not turn to AI in some way to get help with. And the last time, there have been two times in my life that has happened where I woke up one day and all of my personal friends changed the way they interface with their computers when I was in middle school and everyone got an AIM and MySpace and Live Journal and Facebook. And then in college, starting with the Blackberry and then the iPhone when

we started doing things like Instagram and then stories on Snapchat. This is that third time in my life. And I feel like because we're so in the tech world talking about AI, and I actually think I did a poor job of leading us about a year ago because I felt uncomfortable about this. In our industry, AI is like a political topic. It's like politics where you have these two extreme parties and voices that dominate the conversation

because they have the time to care about it. You have these AGI maximalists that are like, get ready for UBI. And then you have people that actually has a reaction to this. And I was part of that at the beginning, are like, it's slop, it's garbage, it's a dystopian, it's gonna write our emails to our loved ones, like how dumb it is.

And I think when you get out of the building, which we've tried to do for the past year and a half and talk to people that are not in tech, it's somewhere in the middle, but I would actually say slightly closer to the AGI side of it is rewiring how people interface with their computers. There was this University of Nebraska student I interviewed and she was talking about, I turned to it for meal planning and for help with outfits and friend advice in school. And so the foundational kind of observation of DIA was that what is a browser?

It is technically a user agent. Your browser is designed to represent you to webpages and web servers and bring stuff back on your behalf. And so it seems so clear outside of the tech world and Arc and all that stuff aside that people wanted to interface with the internet, not just with webpages anymore, but with AI models,

and probably in the future agents like Deep Research. And shouldn't your interface to the internet be able to both handle webpages and chat and models and agents? And so that was the observation that made us so excited to work on DIA. We can obviously talk about Arc as well and the challenges we had there,

but that really was the inciting observation that led us to say, wait a minute, if we're really building a browser, a user agent for the next five, 10 years, which we have to think about, the world is so clearly going there, whether or not the AGI versus AI slop to bake gets talked about the most.

I think the big question that opens up though, is that like the browser company, a lot of people felt very passionate about the browser company because you guys put so much effort into making the Thursday updates like an event and the onboarding how it was so colorful and there's just like a feeling that everyone really got close to and associated with. And so I think the feeling that a lot of the community is like, well, if you're going to do this fine, but why not just integrate that into Arc?

Like what's the point of of starting a whole new browser instead of just putting those AI features into Arc itself? Yeah, and I wanna touch on the Thursday updates and the feelings, because it's really important, you all were actually influential here. What people miss was the first year of Arc. The first year of Arc did not have a lot of the stuff that people love, and the way that we got to that place

was by testing it early with people who were like, nah, I don't like it. Here's what I don't like about it. And this is missing the soul. Like, where is that feeling? Where are the craft details? Where is the browser company spirit? And then us integrating it. You better believe that's in the version of DIA

when we launched. We just like testing early and often. Now the question of why not integrate into Arc, boy, did we try. Like a year of my life trying to figure out how we could take where we thought the world was going and put it in ARC, there are two problems. I wish there were three, because we're all three,

but there are two. The first is, there's this novelty tax that you get when you try a new product. Not you guys, but the average person has a job and they have stuff going on in their life, and someone's like, hey, You should try this new thing arc They have like 30 seconds that they're willing to give to it and as David talked about stumbling over his original pitch They're like, okay

So they're the tabs over here and there are these things called spaces and then they're pin tabs with the pin tabs are different The bookmarks and these ways you gotta try split screen and it's just like the people just couldn't handle How much there was to learn that was new. And so we just felt if the world is gonna as profoundly shift as we think it is because of these AI models, how are we going to teach you how to interface with AI models and agents and whatever the heck comes

while also teaching you about all of those novel concepts? It just seemed, I mean, before AI, that was our biggest problem. That's why we came to the office to try to get you on board, you know, two years ago. It was like, you had someone you worked with saying, it was amazing, and you work in tech trying new products. You're like, nah, I'm good.

So that was problem number one. Problem number two is, it touches me and our team that people love Arc so much. It also had performance issues. I think it had way too many features. We built it in a very prototype experimental way. And what we learned over time is the importance of speed and the importance of reliability

and just your browser feeling snappy. And there were architectural decisions we made in Arc and then layered and layered and layered over time that even if we thought we could solve the novelty problems, it would have been really challenging to hit our bar for speed and performance and other things that were important to us. I don't quite know how to verbalize this, and if you all think about this with your video creations, but it also felt like ARK was not finished, not perfect, but it had

the right components. It was what it was meant to be. It didn't feel like it was missing things. And if you go back to our YouTube comments, maybe a year ago or so, every time we would push a new feature, people would say, I don't want a new feature, I want like Android support. And I don't want a new feature, I want this to be faster.

And so I feel like we don't also don't talk enough in the software world about like when a product is not done, but in the state it is meant to be, and it is what it is. And you can do with it what you want. And to me, again, people that used ARK, I'm sure you didn't have that many complaints with the tab model or the craft details. It sort of felt like the product

was what it was meant to be, and there was something to just like come to terms with. Does that make sense? Yeah, no, I think that was one of my questions was, essentially, is ARK a finished product? Because it is so different and it is so built and it has these new fundamentals and now it kind of does this new thing. And obviously there's optimizations and speed improvements and little things here and there

but essentially as an idea is it done? Yes. I feel like it kind of is. At least that was my take which is why you know I think people who use Arc are kind of just asking for the little things now instead of just like massive new ideas. But yeah, go ahead with that. Yeah, and the analogy that we use internally is, or one of them is, you know, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange,

there was a mix tape that put him on the scene before that. And that only appealed to a certain type of audience. It was a great mix tape, but Channel, but it was done, it was a finished work of art. It was a complete thought. And Channel Orange was a, how do we make something? I'm not sure this is how we thought about it, but like, you know what I mean? It's just finished.

Yeah, it's funny because in the video world where we make a video, we can edit the video forever. Like I can edit one video for a year and it could never be done. But at a certain point, I have to get to 97% and go on to the next one. And so the video gets published and it's done and I can never finish it. In the software world, people have this expectation of updates forever. Like you buy a new phone and you're like,

I want to get software updates for as long as possible. If I download and install a browser, I want new features and new updates for forever. So the expectation is different, but yeah, I feel like it's maybe a little bit more of a statement of the idea being so different that it can finish and be sort of published and that's different in a software world. And honestly, I think it's,

I'm surprised we don't talk about software more as a cultural product, like a video or a piece of art in that way in that I looked at my iPhone screen, for example, and many of the apps that I still love and I've used for decades, Instapaper, iWriter, even Apple Notes, they're pretty much the same product, and I'm happy with it. Like one of the things that I will reflect on in a decade

is we started putting out these videos very early on when other tech companies didn't do that, and really not with a plan, just to sort of be ourselves and be open and invite the community in. And just, I don't know, it was an experiment. And a consequence, I think, of our kind of experimental, prototype-driven culture, where every week there is new stuff, and our experiment of being like,

let's just be open about what we're doing, meant that we set this expectation that like every week there's gonna be some new hotness, new features, and that we thrived on that for so long. Think about Safari. Is Safari a finished product? How long has it... It updates once a year. Yeah. No one complains about that.

How, you know, if you, whoever you over there use Chrome, how often are you like, man, this new Chrome feature is dope. So I'm, that's, I don't know what to do with that. Again, it's a byproduct of the way we I have run this company But I think there's also this interesting bar where no one's complaining that Safari hasn't gotten like wild new features in a long time So that's fair. I have done a horrible job in many ways I think communicating about what the heck is going on at the browser company So I will own that but arcs not going anywhere arc is not going anywhere arc is not going anywhere. We're just focused on

Dia in terms of where most of our energy is. And then yeah, let's do Chromium upgrades, let's do security patches, let's do bug fixes, let's do the same things that these other browsers do. Okay. How much of your company would you say that you have devoted to making sure that ARK is stable?

There are probably three engineers at any given time working on one of those topics. Okay. But just to be really clear, I don't wanna over, we are not building new features as of now for Arc. But that is very different than like, this product is being sunsetted or going anywhere or anything like that.

When you see your two company or two browsers together, do you expect people to move from Arc to Dia or do you kind of expect the Arc world to stay in Arc and Dia is a new subset of people coming to it? Yeah, I think we're in a little bit uncharted territory for a software company of our stage and that we called it the browser company for a reason. We could have changed the name to Arc many times.

And so we've always been excited about having a portfolio of products and of browsers. Having said that, I do think a lot of the things people love about Arc will come to Dia in some form. And so the honest answer is like, I don't know. Because one of the things that's been perplexing about Arc is we tried to get to the root of what was powerful about Arc for people. And it turned out there were like seven different

archetypes that used like, there was the archetype that used the browser in zero Chrome like David is here and kind of flew around with keyboard shortcuts. And you had like the space organizer with pin tabs and folders renamed everything. And so in terms of are people gonna go from Arc to Dia, we're not gonna force anyone to do anything. I really like, I'm an Apple fan boy.

I'm inspired by that. You got the like the MacBook Pro or, and then the MacBook Air and the iPad and it's different things for different people. But I suspect when we bring things over like a vertical sidebar, when we take a novel take on tab management, I think a lot of people,

not to mention the browser company kind of design, flare and craft, I suspect a lot of Arc people will prefer Dia, but I get excited about having both for the foreseeable future. So what's your plan to move those Chrome users over then? Because if the whole idea is it's too complicated for most people, it's equally complicated

to just get someone to move on to something else at all. There's a lot of friction there. You're a small company. There's not a lot of brand recognition for my mom. How are you planning on like finding those people who were never gonna see the browser company at all? Because the whole point, right, is that you,

is that Arc is sort of a limited user base because it's the power users. If Dia is supposed to be, let's take all of Chrome's market share, how do you access those people at all? Yeah, well that is the big question. That has always been the question for this company from day one.

So I don't wanna purport to have like the definite answer But the theory of dia is so if you go back to the idea of a browser as a user agent And it's a user agent for web pages and now it's gonna be user agent for models and chat I think one of things we concluded with Arc is that chrome actually and so far do great jobspages. Obviously there are things around tab management and along the sides, but like I think for most people, they're fine with the way their user agent, their browser opens tabs.

When you talk to those people I referenced, the college friend and my wife about what is frustrating about these AI chat tools, we really hear two things. The first is it's a pain in the butt to get that context out of whatever app or file you're working in into the chat tool so it has the awareness of what you're working on to do the damn thing. The second thing that frustrates them is it doesn't know anything about them. Even with memory, it knows the chats that you've had, but it doesn't really know what is your taste, what is your

writing style, what are the things that you love, what are the things that you don't like. The browser, the traditional browser and traditional webpages solve both of those issues. Because as we started with, what are your tabs in 2025? They're apps and they're files. So you don't have to copy and paste and futz around to get stuff out into chat. Let's just bring these AI models right to where you are

in the apps and files that you use every day. And then the second bet is that, you know how when you use Instagram Reels or TikTok for better or worse, it feels like every swipe, every action like teaches the algorithm to better understand you. The way that it should feel in the future is that in an AI browser like DIA,

every tab that you open, it feels like this model. It's not Sam Altman's GPT-40, it's like GPT David, and it's getting better and better and trained for you every action that you take, so that when you ask a question about something else, it not only has the context of that tab that you don't have to copy and paste into a tool, it also remembers the last seven shopping sessions that you did, or the last 17 things that you wrote.

Like the way that I've been, I can't quite, this is the first external marketing thing I've done, so I don't actually have my language down yet, but there's something I've been thinking about that with Arc, the sort of hero image was the cluttered tab bar. Whenever we showed like seven windows with 50 tabs open, people were like, I hate that,

I want whatever this is that fixes that. And that's so interesting, because in the old world, that was a problem. That was clutter, that was chaos. In the world of AI models, that is like oil. It is the context that is missing to make these models actually understand you. And so the bet that you have to believe,

which I know maybe not all of you do, is that truly AI is gonna change how we interface with our computers and the things that you turn to it for. If you don't believe that, we're screwed. If you believe that Future is going to be a reality that I think the convenience of having it right there in your tools and files Combined with the compounding personalization that you get from that awareness

Yeah, is something that at least from talking to people outside the building. That's what that's what is on their mind right now They're not complaining about you know, man when I go to Google and I click this link this sucks Give me a browser, that's not what's going on in the world anymore. Yeah, so I've used Dia for a little bit, and I think all these are really great features. Being able to refer to another tab I have open and get context and like, and totally have this be helpful alongside the web for me has been awesome.

But the Chrome question still, which is, we were just talking about Chrome earlier in the office, which is Chrome is somehow one of the, quietly one of the most successful consumer products of all time. It somehow managed to be the default without having a mechanism to become the default. There is no like, I mean, there's Chromebooks, but it's like, yeah, they found their way.

But like when you get a new computer, people just put Chrome on it. That's the default behavior. And so we watched Google I.O., we watched Google have all these plans to integrate Gemini and have a sort of co-pilot, if you will, alongside the web with you. And they talked at length

about how they have all this context. We plug into your Gmail and your calendar, and we know of all your docs and all the things you've scheduled, and we can answer emails for you based on all this context. We plug into your Gmail and your calendar, and we know of all your docs and all the things you've scheduled, and we can answer emails for you based on all this context. So in a world where people consciously seek out Chrome, and it's an incredibly powerful brand,

how do you sort of kick down the door and introduce people to Dia and maybe even have to differentiate DIA from Chrome where they will probably be trying to do as many of these things as possible. Yeah, especially because Chrome has this like crazy ability to already have all of your data. So when Gemini gets put in Chrome,

all of a sudden it already has all the context where DIA you have to teach it about yourself. The whole idea of where DIA is going very shortly is that you don't teach it about yourself? The whole idea of where Dia is going very shortly is that you don't teach, you just browse. So yes, if it's not your default browser, then we can't help you. But if you switch to it in earnest, just your normal browsing is gonna personalize it.

But I think the deeper question here is, okay, you're competing with Chrome, just 5 billion monthly active users. And right, isn't that wild? Because that is the thing that people have been sleeping on is if you're interested in consumer products, don't talk about Snapchat, talk about Chrome, right? So, but really the heart of your question is like,

how the heck are you gonna compete? And I'll say, this has been the question since day one. Prior to Dia, you know, if I was doing an interview about Arc, it was like, man, why can't they just add split screen if they just add a vertical sidebar, aren't they screwed? And so that doesn't mean it's not a, you know, if I was doing an interview about ARC, it was like, man, why can't they just add split screen? If they just add a vertical sidebar, aren't they screwed? And so that doesn't mean it's not a real threat, but what we've seen is they have a very powerful incentive, which is search and search ads.

And so you know that Gemini button? We know from someone we interviewed that that thing was supposed to be the default in a much more bold way, but it tanks search ad revenue. Like one of the things in DIA that people love the most is we train this on-device ML model that lives in your URL bar to make it really AI native, that when you type a query,

it parses that query to understand what is it that you're asking for? And it will send you to Google a lot, but if we think it's better to send it to AI chat or any number of AI agents or apps in the future, we just route you there. It's this really powerful thing where you don't have to learn modifier keys, talk about the novelty text.

You don't have to learn any new features. We just infer your intent and send you the right place. Could Google do that? Yeah, could they do it better than us? Almost definitely. You know what that will tank dramatically overnight? Like the whole premise of an AI browser is search engines are not as important as they used to be. You should probably pretty rarely go to them now.

So will Google and Chrome get to the motivation where they wanna do that? I'm sure at some point, on the top three things that keep me up at night, in my next 12 months running this company, that is not one of them. I think you've seen the announcement. The Gemini, I got, honestly, I saw the video, I was like, oh no.

Right? Okay, so it's a button that you have to go pay for Gemini, go pay for it, by the way, so there goes your default. Who's gonna pay that? And then after you pay for it, you gotta go into Chrome, you gotta go into settings, and then you gotta turn on this button. You know, it's such,

it just felt like such a Wall Street gesture. So how then, if we can agree that we have some time, but it's such, it just felt like such a Wall Street gesture. So how then, if we can agree that we have some time horizon by which the search ad model and all of their incentives are gonna mean they're slow to truly do it AI native. We have a window, what do we have to, we have only one shot, it's always been our shot, build something absolutely awesome that people love.

Can we do it? I don't know, but like, I think we are here because we did it once and we built a following for software that made people feel something in a category that they never cared about before. Gonna be really hard to do it again, but I have faith that if we are, if we go back to our roots and we're as excited

and optimistic and creative and open as we've always been, that's the only shot we got and it got us here. So Google also knows that people are going to be moving towards, you know, agents and asking their web browser full questions instead of searching in SEO, right? Like we've all been programmed over the years to search in SEO because we know how search engines work. People are slowly moving towards just using full questions in Google search. Talking like a human, not a robot. Exactly, and that's the reason they introduced AI mode,

and now they have the Chrome, like the Gemini agent in the corner. I hear you when you say like, oh, well, they don't wanna destroy their ads business because that's their whole business, but I think they also understand like everyone else is moving that direction. So is your bet that you don't have any reins

on the fact that Google's ad business is going to get destroyed if they move towards this business where they're just serving you answers and they're more constrained because they wanna move towards that because they know everyone else is gonna do it, but they need to figure out how to monetize it? Yeah, let me tell you a story about that,

and then I'm gonna tell you what I'm really worried about so it doesn't just sound like my founder, it's like, oh, we got this figured out. So someone that previously worked at a browser company, this guy named Darren Fisher, that ran Chrome for, I think, 16 years or something like that, and he told me this story about,

there is this one feature where, on the new tab page, underneath the URL bar, they show your most visited websites and they switched it to the favicons of the websites because it's much easier to quickly notice the Twitter icon, for example. Overnight tank global search revenue by 5%. Massive freak out.

Now actually Sundar to his credit, Sundar was the original PM on Chrome. That was his first, that was the project that put him on the map. Great guy, Sundar, to his credit, Sundar was the original PM on Chrome. That was his first, that was the project that put him on the map. Great guy, Sundar seems like a wonderful human. He said, no, it doesn't matter, we're gonna ship it. But there's a huge impact. If that tiny change does five,

I don't know if it's exactly 5%, whatever it was, what happens when you change the URL bar, which an Apple VP told me is the most popular text box on all of Mac OS is Chrome's URL bar, which an Apple VP told me is the most popular text box on all of Mac OS is Chrome's URL bar. Is that wild? That's crazy. Definitely sure.

Isn't that wild? If you change that to say, hey, how about 40% of the time we don't send you to Google? I just don't, I don't see it. I don't see it anytime soon. Now the thing that really worries me, which I know I may not be in an audience that will believe this and we can talk about it.

I think the way we use the web and the internet is gonna change faster than we expect. And I think if you get out of the building and talk to a cousin or a niece in high school or college, I worry much more about a world where AI chat interfaces like chat GBT or pick your favorite one, actually just replace the browser wholesale at some point and sooner than we think.

So what keeps me up at night is, is Chrome, not is Chrome going to add this button and the buttons will be a sidebar and then they're going to get it. It's going to be like, wait a minute. Are we too close to it? Like what, what comes really after? Cause if you look at the similar waves, it wasn't the magazine on the internet on the web. Right.

And so that, that's the thing that I think about is are we being bold enough? Which it has a tension with our novelty tax. So our bet with Dia is make it look familiar. So in that 30 second budget that we have, you get it on Tuesday at 11 a.m. and you can just go. We import everything instantly, it generally looks the same, you feel the design craft and love, and then kind of reveal to you over time

how powerful it is in these new ways without you having to learn new things. The risk I think is actually that we even are being too incremental and we're not being bold enough. Now again, I have a bunch of reasons why I think we're in a good spot, but I think if I'm back here in a year and you invite me back and like it didn't work out, I promise you it's not gonna be because Chrome

did something with Gemini, it's gonna be because even even even though I'm coming on this podcast to say like, I know you think, you know, AI overviews aren't good, but like people are interfacing, they're talking to their computers, they're thinking with their computers are doing things they've never done before. It's going to be because we even underestimated how much that's going to change the way our user agents and we interface. And I think that's the thing that people, including me, missed, is I was comparing these tools to Google.

And it's like I've been trained for decades to do this robotic syntax. And so what I was doing- I see you speak here. Yeah, and so what I was doing is I was doing that in Chat GBT, but that's not what, people are doing net new use cases. They're talking to their computers

and getting help with things they never did before. And I think we don't Like I think there's this weird stigma around it where you talk to someone you get him in a quiet moment And they'll like I can't tell you the number of conversations had those like man. This is kind of weird I like I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this but like I had like a 90 minute conversation with chat last night about This emotional topic in my life. And I teared up at the end and people are embarrassed. There's like this social stigma

because of that political debate that I spoke about. So I just wanna say the quiet thing out loud. We can think it's weird. It doesn't mean people are having sex with robots. And it doesn't mean that like, you know, we're all gonna be out of jobs, but why can't we be excited and just name that like for the first time in like a decade or two,

the way people are like using and doing things with computers is changing. Like. It is fun to think about that there's entire generations of people, like we've already done this with different like paradigm shifts, but like it's crazy to us, a bunch of 20, 30 plus year olds that there are people who don't know what a world

without smartphones is like, because they just became the thing that people use. And I think Google search has been one of those things for so long where everyone in this room knows how to do a Google search. And there is going to be a generation that grows up that never has to learn SEO speak and just punches in whatever they wanna know

into a chat bot that can tell them ideally the correct answer, but some sort of answer. So that paradigm shift, I think, is a fair bet to make, and it's just a matter of following user behavior and building something that, ideally, is useful to that new behavior. Yeah, and that's where I think what we're excited about is not so much trying to better solve the,

when was the, what year did the American Revolution start? I think Google's great for that. It's what are these net new things that people are doing that they couldn't have done before, is where, that's the heat we're following, or trying to follow. I have a stat right here because I was wondering this, and I learned this before,

but approximately 15% of all daily Google searches are brand new, which is interesting. That was already interesting to me, but I bet the number of things people are typing into these chatbots that have never been typed before is sky high. Yeah. It is extremely high,

just because we see that behavior is so new. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is AI a feature or a product? I feel very confident that in five years on macOS or Windows, the application that has

default browser permission will look much more similar to an AI chat interface than a browser. And the web pages that you access within them and the tabs you access within them are going to feel much more like tool calls or tools that that AI chat interface can wield for you and open for you, which doesn't mean you're not opening a big Figma link.

It doesn't mean you're not typing in Google Docs. But I absolutely think without question, the hierarchy is going to flip. I'm not telling you it's gonna be Dia for sure, but I feel incredibly, I mean, think about all the heat that we're getting right now. It's not fun.

Right? It's not, it's not, it's much more enjoyable to be like the art guy and everyone's like, oh, I love the way animations. I wouldn't do this. I would not do this if I didn't believe in my bones that this is one of those moments

where the paradigm is gonna shift, which doesn't mean we're gonna succeed, but without question. And I'm like, I kinda wanted to come on here and give a little more of the raw, just timestamp it for myself, honestly. Like in my, you know, yeah, I don't know. I could be wrong.

I could be totally naive, but why I feel that conviction is, this didn't don't know. I could be wrong. I could be totally naive, but why I feel that conviction is, this didn't come from Twitter. I got off Twitter. This is, I literally went to college campuses and just spent time with people, and it's just- Can I ask one more question?

I'm here as long as this is like, cathartic for me. I might have a question, but yeah. How are you gonna make money? We are going to charge for DIA. That is one of the other really interesting cultural shifts. It's like when we started the browser company, the idea that people would pay for software in a kind of broader sense was not a popular idea. And one of the things with these AI tools,

I'm an angel investor in this company called Cursor that makes, it's sort of like DIA for coding. It takes a traditional IDE VS code, and it doesn't just add a sidebar. It kind of imbues these AI models within every part of the IDE experience. It is the fastest growing software company of all time in terms of revenue ramp, in terms of the amount of charges every month. Now it's very different. Those are software engineers and it's much more valuable than D is today. But I think there is now finally a model where you can say, Hey, if you really offer

something that unique and valuable, especially because what is our argument is gonna be, this thing knows you better than any other AI chat tool. It knows you better, it really gets you and it's right there, so yeah. Now when you say charge for DA, because I know as of right now, we're testing a version of it that's super early.

Is it going to be, you're gonna charge for the whole browser or are you gonna charge for a feature inside of DA or what's the- No, we're gonna charge for the whole browser or you're gonna charge for a feature inside of DA or what's the point? No, we're gonna charge for a premium bundle at some point. So one of the things that's really interesting is we spoke briefly about how we built this ML model in our URL bar that routes you to different places. There are more and more of, I hate the word agents,

but there are more and more of these AI apps or agents coming online that are very specialized and actually often string together a bunch of different models and kind of custom prompting and tool integrations. You can imagine a world where just the base dia is free, but then you know, you can buy the like software engineering bundle or the sales and marketing bundle or again, I'm making this up. But I that's another thing is this industry is so bad with like naming and human words But this concept of agents though It is annoying to say that word is is is really real and powerful and the things you can do when you string these models

And tools together and so I think as you see more and more of those kind of verticalized Applications that are native to AI being able to unlock those and route you to different places And do you believe like a mobile model works with that too? Cause like we're not, you know, there's all these ideas of this company, I.O., taking away your phone, see if that happens. But do you see Dia also being on a mobile interface? You have to be, right?

I think that was one of the reasons that you even took a while to get on ARC cause we weren't on Android. So I think you have to be on mobile. I think the interface on mobile is much more of a remote control. So if you think about the desktop browsers primarily, go back to the TikTok analogy,

every tab you open, it's getting personalized to you, but actually that personalization is owned and controlled by you. And that's why we're doing things in the browser. Well, now that is like kind of personalizing the algorithm for lack of a better framing. When you're on your phone, you just gonna want to talk to it and you're gonna want to get its help But it doesn't it's kind of based in that awareness and knowledge. It's compounded from desktop But I think similar to arc what a browser is on mobile is very different than desktop

So I do not imagine a world for example where anyone is mobile only with Dia. That would miss the raw power. You know, it really needs, and I think if you go back to our first YouTube video and the original idea for the browser company, it was this idea of an internet computer, which was because the browser is popular because it's now an operating system because your apps and files are there.

What that means is your computing life is in the cloud. It's all stored on a server somewhere. And if that's true, then your computer in air quotes should be able to go with you to any device because it's all just in the cloud. It's all stored on a server somewhere. And if that's true, then your computer in air quotes should be able to go with you to any device because it's all just in the cloud. Context follows you. Exactly, that still holds in this world, which means that, all right,

if you're just on your mobile phone and you don't wanna use it on desktop, you're missing the power of that. But I think whether it's OpenAI or Google, that is where, I think the thesis was right, whether or not we win or not, which is your computer is gonna increasingly feel like this deeply personalized AI model

that goes with you across all devices, and different devices play different roles, with mobile being more of like easy input, probably voice centric, with desktop playing the personalization engine that really knows what's going on in your life, especially your livelihood. I don't know what this IO thing's gonna be,

your TV, or your car, but you better believe it's gonna be there too. Good luck to them. Yeah. I guess while we have you, the question, personalization is often on the opposite end of the spectrum is privacy, where if I'm using Google's thing, Google has to know everything about me

to deliver that level of personalization. And it's interesting hearing you guys who have made your own models and are going to build things that keep all this context and knowledge about you. How much are you thinking about privacy? And if people care a lot about privacy, should they like something like this? Yeah, our view is giving people control

and be just being very transparent. I think one thing that is true though, is to get the most power from these models, it needs your personal context. Like it's not even worth it if you're not willing to teach it about yourself. And so I think at some point actually, these MacBooks and your phones are gonna get strong enough

and open source models are gonna get small enough and powerful enough that they can run locally on device. In the meantime, you have to be okay sending your data to an API that is gonna, you know, integrate it into the model. But I mean, as you know, what API that is gonna, you know, integrate it into the model. But I mean, as you know, what we found is like, people will make that trade, actually the same friend I was talking about,

he's gonna hate me for saying this. I had this moment where I was like, you gotta ban TikTok. Like, this is just bad for, like, get rid of it, right? And he's like, honestly, it brings me so much joy giggling at these TikTok videos all day, like the CCP can have it all if like my time On the toilet feels like that enjoyable. So I would say that is on one extreme of the spectrum

But generally I think if you show up to someone like hey, you're busy. You got a lot of stuff going on in your life Here's this thing that can actually help you in meaningfully new ways And all you have to do is browse like you've always browsed and we're just gonna use your browsing data And you know to to train an AI model to be better for you. I actually think many people would be willing to do that. Andrew, you had a question. Yeah, I had a question, and it's not DIA specific, but AI browser specific, and maybe since you're in this,

it's a question we ask all the time and might be able to shine some light on it, but we talk all the time about these conversational searches instead of old school links and everything like that. And a lot of that comes down to like, what's the best TV I should buy? You know, asking a question is consumer based, but it's scraping data from websites where a reporter spent time where that reporter gets paid by advertisers on the site. How or have you thought about at all, whether it's Dia or just in general,

like how are people like that compensated or even like, you know, we make YouTube videos and we there's lots of stuff about chat, GPT probably scraping a ton of YouTube videos. So like we're losing viewers, the people who are doing the original personal content are potentially losing out. And then it gets to the old dead internet theory of later on like who's going to be making It's gonna make the kind of these articles that AI scrapes from yeah anymore. Yeah, so sorry. That's a very big question No, I don't get to come on the podcast and just get this off balls like I'm here as long as you guys want So there's the kind of the dia specific what we've observed And I think there's the larger ecosystem question on the dia side

This goes back when we started when I first had my own ideas about AI, I was thinking about it much more in the, what are the things I already do in a search engine or browser, and how does AI make it better? And that's where I was missing the forest for the trees. What we see in Dia is people aren't using it to do that sort of stuff.

It's almost like a companion or a partner on whatever they're working on. So, you know, an example that we put in a video which came from a college student is, you're buying a used car, you have two links of similar models side by side and Dia's split screen, which is the same as Arx, and you're like, what's the difference?

I'm not a car guy. Like, help me understand the difference. And then you have Dia's sidebar, or Dia's chat sidebar, as a way to kind of like work through and understand the difference between those. That's true with writing. You have a document open and you're working through it

and you have it right there side by side. So what we're seeing is the most popular use cases in Dia are less of a, hey, I was doing this before and now I'm doing this. And much more like I couldn't turn to my computer to have opinions before. My computer never had opinions. It couldn't be subjective, and now it can.

So that is kind of what I was saying before about the narrative we get so locked into these kind of memes in our industry that I think we're missing what people are generally actually doing. So it's less of a, I'm going to Gemini, I'm going to ChatGBT and just asking random questions, and it's more of a, I'm using my browser like I've always used a browser,

but now I'm just understanding the context of what's on the page better. Of the page I've opened my browser like I've always used a browser, but now I'm just understanding the context of what's on the page better. Of the page I've opened already. That I've already opened. Again, I haven't been on any press or anything yet, so I'm still working through how to talk about this, but think about it like this. One of the ideas behind Arc was that,

how do you put what matters to someone's life at the top instead of these tech ideas? And what I mean by that is like, you gotta buy a used car. That's at the top of the pyramid. That's what matters to you. And so in order to do that, you need car sites and you need to read things and you need to check out the photos and all that stuff. What is new is now our computers can have the perception of thinking, having opinions, giving feedback, critiquing, joking. And that is just a new tool in the toolkit of buying a used car. And so what's new is that second, in my opinion,

it's that almost emotional intelligence, not the IQ that is so new and what people are really turning to it for, not just doing the thing we used to do, that old tool we had in a new way where there's definitely that. To come back to your ecosystem question, which is what I think you were really answering though,

this is where I think other people go on podcasts and stuff. I have no idea. No one has any idea. And I think it's one of, I don't know if scary is the right word, but like the web as we know it was broken, is breaking even faster, and it just doesn't make sense anymore. So I don't, not only do I not have an answer

to what replaces the web and the incentive structure I haven't heard anything from anyone that Suggest and and it's just this complex problem where it's what's so wonderful about the web is it's decentralized and it's open There are so many different actors and players in it that kind of need to work together and in 2025 we don't generally work together on things that affect all Society very well right now. So I don't know, man, but this is why it just, it feels like it's coming.

And our approach has always been, we have this value, assume you don't know, which is like, we have no idea what we're doing. So how do you proceed if you have no idea what you're doing? You build stuff really quickly, you go to the MKBHD office, you give them DIA, they tell you, you got a lot of work to do, you go back to work, you come back.

And so like our approach is like, just get in there, have these conversations and try our best. But in terms of like, how are publishers like, insert your favorites publisher, that post text-based blog posts that were accessed through Google search engines, what happens after that? Yeah.

We're about to find out. It is a big question. I was just gonna mention, because one of my biggest pet peeves is I'll be on Twitter and I'll post a video and someone will be like, Grock, tell me what this video says. And then they'll summarize the video and be like, great,

I'm not gonna watch the video now. Great, okay, so now half the people who were gonna watch it lose that information bit. But some people will still watch it for entertainment value. And to use the buying a used car analogy, watch it lose that information bit. But, you know, some people will still watch it for entertainment value. And, you know, to use the like, buying a used car analogy, there are so many different behaviors that I see,

which is there are people who just wanna speed run learning about the car, don't really care too much about it, but just need to know like, what's the difference between these two cars? And that is going to pull from some motor trend article reviewing the car passionately. That's going to pull from some Motor Trend article reviewing the car passionately. That's going to pull from some YouTube video

of a guy who used the car for years and did a daily driver 30 minute video. And that kind of breaks a little bit when the incentive goes away. But it also will potentially be a world where someone will go to the Motor Trend article and will read some of it and will ask the sidebar chat for more information or more context to better understand it. Or they'll watch the 30 minute YouTube video and 10 minutes in they'll pause

and ask for some more context to better watch the video. So there's different behaviors, there's different directions that this could go. We don't know. No one seems to know exactly what's going to happen, but it's interesting. And I would take the other side on one specific part. I think that the most kind of soulful, original, in-depth brands and publishers are gonna do better than ever, right? I actually think the MKBHDs of the world, I don't think people are dumb.

And I think when you're gonna buy a gadget or you're trying to understand something that matters to your life, I when you're gonna buy a gadget, or you're trying to understand something that matters to your life, I think you're going to turn, especially in a world of all this AI generated everything, I think you're going to turn to the best of the best more than ever. And I think you're going to be willing to pay more and do more than ever before. What happens to the long tail of the blog that covers air conditioners in a kind of more SEO driven way. And that sort of, that type of business and media company, I have no idea.

But like, if I can invest an MKBHD in the world of AI, I would invest a lot of money. And I'm not just saying that because I'm here, I really believe it. And I think in some ways you even see that a little bit with the browser company. Like I've always thought about how people's love for, maybe love's a strong word,

but endearment to what we're doing and how we're doing it far outweighed our scale. You know, like we wrote a sub stack post yesterday that announced nothing new. It just shared some new data in a clearer way. And it like was at the top of tech meme, which like everyone in the industry reads. That is disproportionate with our user base,

with everything. I was cool, but it didn't make any sense to me. And because I think the way we showed up in the world had a little more soul and spirit and opinion and personality than other startups did. And I think that across industries, including media, is just gonna continue. And I think it's gonna by the way

I don't know there's nothing to do with us But I just I just think people are long they can feel that character and I think in a world of AI People are gonna gravitate towards that more and more still breaks a lot of media You know, I don't know who sells ad for this podcast, but they probably disagree but like I think you all are good You are good You can rest easy that you all are good are like anecdotal version of that is no matter how much we make of like a review of something, Marquez will get X amount of people like dozens,

if not hundreds of people being like, Oh yeah, but what do you really think of like this phone? And like that feels like the type of average person to me that's going to go into that AI chat and be like, what does Marquez like, which phone should I buy? And then not actually go into our video that we spent a lot of time making and let it decide for them.

And like, when it's pulling from our stuff or when it's pulling from a Verge reporter doing a review of that, that's where I work. Is your, are the graphs that you care about relative to 12 months ago, are they up? Are they in the middle or are they down? I think they're in the middle, but I've always also thought about the videos that, up, are they in the middle, or are they down? I think they're in the middle, but I've always also thought about the videos

that, and we are so in the weeds, but it's fine. Isn't that the point of this? It is the point. It's like a bunch of people hanging out. It is, I think the, I think of our audience as kind of two main buckets. One subscribes and watches videos purely for entertainment value

and not for any information or should I buy it at all. And so they'll watch, one of the most common questions I get, or answers that I get is, oh, I love the videos. I never buy anything you're making videos about, but I just like watching them. And then the other bucket is purely informational. They are here because they are on a quest of finding information and figuring out

if they should buy the thing or not. And I think part of what we're talking about here is wiping out one of the buckets, which is that second one, which is I am here for the information, pause the video, ask it a question, get the answer, peace out. And the entertainment portion,

which we happen to have an audience that's here for that too, will remain. And I think what we're probably more concerned about is those that have way less of the entertainment value and are more on the SEO end of like, we have a mission of like delivering information about these products and people don't like show up here for entertainment necessarily, they just come here

for the information. And now those people aren't gonna come here anymore. So that's one of those scary questions I think for that specific type of publisher. Yeah, I would say, I mean, I think it depends on the query. So I think for a query about the American Revolution is different than I'm gonna buy something in my life. At least what we've seen, it's very anecdotal,

is I think people treat the first result back from an AI chat tool in the same way they treated a Google results page. It's a jumping off point. I don't think that's true for all types of queries, but for these types of queries. But David Pierce from The Verge has said something again and again that has really stuck with me

that is, and I'm gonna paraphrase, and sorry, sorry David you did this on your own podcast about something I said so I gotta do this We're fine. Yeah Just like Media companies need to make the best products and they need to think about what they do as products Yeah And so I have no doubt that whatever is going on in your graphs whatever you're worried about This crew and this office setup is awesome. You're gonna make a better product.

And so that's actually part of the reason I'm kind of like doing this and doing the Substack post is I regret not being unapologetically open to the idea that this was all gonna change, even if I didn't buy into this AGI and all this other stuff. And like, what do we gotta do to be ready? And so I feel like in some way it's like,

okay, if that's what you're worried about, you have so much creativity in the tools here that I have no doubt you will make a better product for I want to buy X. How do you do it? Then whatever thing is going to pop out of some AI model. Yeah, I think, yeah, there's going to, again, we don't know what the behavior of the user in the future is.

We know what we see now, and we know where the trends are inflecting towards, but how much they change and whether they totally flip on their head is a completely unanswered question, which I think is something we might lose a little bit because we're so focused on the now, and I think it's an interesting thing to consider.

And it's scary and it impacts, again, it challenges a lot of people and companies, but when we started the browser company, the reason we called it the Browser Company of New York was because we were so bored of startups and startup names and startup products. It was just like a boring moment. Clippy.

Right, yeah. And so the reason I say that is like, I think it is exhilarating, if not a little bit scary, but it's just, there's a moment of creation and rebirth happening here in some ways that are rebirth happening here. And in some ways that are a bummer. And in some ways they're like, man, I'm, I got a, I got two sons that I'm like, man, I'm not excited for how we deal with that in a bit. And in other ways, it's like, I bet you come here every day to do things like, how do we do this new product challenge? You know, like you

wouldn't be doing this. You would have sold this company or done this a lot differently if you didn't enjoy that challenge. So that's how we're trying to show up to this is like, yeah, we have no idea, but how privileged are we that we are at the age we are in the industry that we are in this moment in time? Like, yeah, I know that sounds very cheesy, but. To ground us a little bit, do you have like a timeline of when Dia will feel

like this product that you are sort of pitching because I think right now, I think a lot of the backlash from Arc being, I don't know about Sunset, but maintained and Dia coming out is that like part of the reason that people love Arc is because you built in the open. Yeah. Right. And now you're building Dia in the open. I think a lot of those Arc users love the browser company,

so they were frustrated that Arc was being sunset and- Not being sunset. Not being sunset. Not being sunset. Being maintained. Journalism, yep. Sorry, being maintained. Is that the version of Dia that people have access to right now is very bare bones and doesn't necessarily meet

the more grand or ideas that you have for how you're gonna interact with this AI browser. So do you have like a timeline of when people are going to be able to play with something that has those capabilities? Yeah, it obviously depends on what bits you're talking about, but I'll try to answer. Yeah. By the way, yeah, some other point over beers, I'd love to talk about the pros and cons of building in public and being transparent in public on YouTube. Yeah, actually when my second son was born, I left the hospital in Paris actually to go get food for my wife.

And someone's like, hey, Ark, I love it. I was like, whoa, this is like a new, this is not what I thought was gonna. But any event, to answer your question super directly, I'd say if you're someone that tried Ark or has never tried Ark and you try Dia, to get to the bar where you're like, oh, this feels better than Chrome, six weeks,

you are on an old version of it, I feel good about that. In terms of the both, I'd say grander of what I'm talking about, which again, was always there with Arc. So we're gonna be like, internet computer operating system for their web. The grander and the, I'd say, Arc members feeling like

it has enough of the basic, you know, the things that they live, the vertical sidebar. I'd say somewhere between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. But again, on the, hey, you just browse like you normally do and this like model self-personalizes to you. That's gonna be a many, many year thing. But what we did with Arc was just like, let's be honest about where we're going

and build it in public and around people. Like, you know, the other day, one of the things we're gonna release soon and the kind of when we give it to Arc members very soon is there were these college students that were hacking our personalization features to make these mini apps, like almost like AI apps. So they created the syntax where they would be like,

when I do backslash gadgets, I want you to do these 17 things. And so then they'd go, they'd hit a new tab and do backslash gadgets and then whatever they wanted to do. And they kind of like made their own little apps. And we're like, well, and multiple did for different use cases.

And this goes back to the like native to the technology, native to the phone. We're like, well, that's pretty wild. And so what we've been sprinting to do that we weren't gonna do five weeks ago is like, man, we gotta formalize this and see if we make it even easier what other people do. And so that's all to say part of the reason

that the grandeur, it won't be there right away is the stuff's hard and it takes time. But part of the reason is the reason Arc is so beloved is because we were like, we have no idea what we're doing. Let's put some stuff out there see what people do react to it And so we also want to have time to say maybe the big idea here is actually AI native apps aren't gonna be these agents They're gonna be these like user created and shared little mini apps that it's an idea. It's an idea I guess I'll throw out one more and maybe we end this with this is a feature suggestion, please

So I think you mentioned earlier, you know Arc is I'll throw out one more, and maybe we end this with this, is a feature suggestion. Please. So I think you mentioned earlier, you know, Arc is maintained, Dia is rapidly evolving, and maybe adds features from Arc. Yes. And I think you spoke a lot about the novelty factor of like trying to keep it familiar, easy to understand, doesn't look too crazy.

There's this setup process on a couple different phones. I think Asus phones is one of them, super niche, but I log into the phone, I set up the phone, and then I land on a splash screen. And the splash screen is a direct fork between how do you want this to look? Just like Chrome or just like Arc? And I think if I was logging in for the first time

and I was gonna set up Dia and I was showing this to my cousin, he would just fork over and use the version that starts off looking just like Chrome. And I think a lot of people would see the, make it look, give me the Arc stuff button, and they would click that starts off looking just like Chrome. And I think a lot of people would see the make it look, give me the Arc stuff button and they would click that button and they would love it. I think that would be a hero button for Dia. If it, you know, obviously I think you want it to be a mass product and it will be a focus for the future. I think a lot of people would love a lot of these features in Dia with just a click.

I love that. I mean, and the original like internal saying we had was we, for Arc, was we want to make it your home on the internet. So it doesn't feel like you're browsing in some generic hotel room, but it's yours. I think this is very much in the spirit of that, which is like your browser, your user agent should look like whatever you want it to look like.

So I love that. We'll come back on the pod when that happens and give you a shout out. Bet, deal. All right, cool. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us. Awesome, thank you.

All right, that is it. Thank you again to. Thanks for joining us. Awesome, thank you. All right, that is it. Thank you again to Josh for joining us and let us know what you think. Are those answers convincing? Do we think this browser has a future? Would you use something like Dia? Would you use something like Arc?

Are you still gonna be a Chrome person? Let us know in the comment section below. But either way, we'll see you guys very soon back with your regularly scheduled programming on Friday. See you then. Peace.