# A browser can turn an assistant into an agent

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/a-browser-can-turn-an-assistant-into-an-agent/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Aravind Srinivas](https://realalpha.app/builders/aravind-srinivas/) · Aravind Srinivas is cofounder and CEO of Perplexity. · Held research roles at OpenAI and Google DeepMind before co-founding the AI search engine Perplexity in 2022.
- Host: [Garry Tan](https://realalpha.app/people/garry-tan/) · President & CEO, Y Combinator · Co-founded Posterous and Initialized Capital, an early Coinbase backer.
- Host: [Harj Taggar](https://realalpha.app/people/harj-taggar/) · Managing partner, Y Combinator · Co-founded Auctomatic with the Collison brothers and later Triplebyte.
- Host: [Diana Hu](https://realalpha.app/people/diana-hu/) · Managing partner, Y Combinator · CTO of Escher Reality; after Niantic bought it, ran AR for Pokémon GO.
- Host: [Jared Friedman](https://realalpha.app/people/jared-friedman/) · Managing partner, Y Combinator · Co-founded Scribd, which YC funded in 2006; has advised 20+ YC unicorns.
- Show: Lightcone
- Episode: [Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/), Jul 11, 2025
- Moment: 17:01 to 19:48 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/a-browser-can-turn-an-assistant-into-an-agent/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1021

## Quote

> “like paying your credit cards, buying stuff for you, and being your scout, you know, **going and doing all the research** for you.”
> — [Aravind Srinivas](https://realalpha.app/builders/aravind-srinivas/) at [17:53](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1073) · Lightcone

## Takeaways

1. A browser can give an AI access to the user’s tabs and history.
2. Agents could handle forms, purchases and recurring research tasks.
3. Multi-step screening can combine web research with a user’s criteria.

## About this segment

Aravind Srinivas argues that a browser can give AI access to tabs, history and forms, enabling tasks chatbots cannot handle alone. He illustrates the idea with research and screening applications.

From “Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search”, Jul 11, 2025. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[17:08](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1028) Okay, let's assume, let's accept that OpenAI is extremely well-funded, doesn't have all these innovative dilemma problems, wants to actually ship search onto ChatGPT. ChatGPT is the most successful consumer AI product out there. And so competing against it is very difficult, which is why I really want to, like, push the company more on the browser side. And I think Comet, the browser, will be an abstraction layer about chatbots.

[17:37](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1057) You could even imagine, like, you know, if you permit Comet, all your ChatGPT chats can, you know, be fed into that AI. And, like, you don't even have to worry about memory or personalization or, like, you know, any of these things. And it'll do a lot of new things that a chatbot cannot do, like accessing other tabs, accessing your browsing history, going and completing forms for you, like paying your credit cards, buying stuff for you, and being your scout, you know, going and doing all the research for you.

[18:07](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1087) That sort of thing, like periodic recurring tasks, I think that's the magic that the browser enables for you. And putting it into, like, mobile, like building mobile versions of this browser is going to be very hard, like just engineering-wise, it's going to take many months. So I'm not really worried about someone else trying to copy this. It's going to take time for anybody. Switching to a different browser is a pretty big decision for a user.

[18:30](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1110) What do you think will be the very short-term things that your browser will do so much better than what I can get today in Chrome that will make me want to switch? The perfect blend of AI, navigation, and agents is what we're going to offer. And it might sound like a boring answer, but no one's done that. And there are like hundreds of millions, probably close to a billion people using AI these days.

[18:55](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1135) So the market's already pretty big. What's like a specific example of how I would do that, you know, if I had access to it tomorrow? You can schedule your meetings. You can reply to some of your emails that you don't even want to read. Like for example, let's say you're hosting a Y Combinator event and you say, I only want to accept Stanford dropouts. And it can go through the entire list of people who applied and just filter based on who's in order to scrape their LinkedIn URLs, filter based on whether they were Stanford and whether they dropped out or not, and then accept it.

[19:28](https://realalpha.app/v/2jOnoTEk-xA/?t=1168) Like that level of multi-step reasoning is something you can uniquely do. By the way, I'm not saying that's a good filter. I wouldn't get it otherwise. So hopefully you're more open. We look for deep-minded researchers also. Yeah. Don't worry. Okay, cool.