AI browsers may be a costly detour from better products

Transcript

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

1. 46:28

   In related news, OpenAI and Perplexity are going after the browser. Perplexity launched Comet for their $200 a month tier. I actually downloaded it. I'll show it to you in a second. But this is a really interesting category. It's something developers can do already, and they do it all the time. you know but having your browser uh connected to agents lets you do really interesting things i'll show you an example here that i just fired off while we're talking so i just asked it hey give me the best flights from united airlines and business class from new york city from san francisco to new york city it does some searches but what you see here is it's popped up a browser window and it's actually doing that work and you can see the steps it's using and then i can actually open that browser window and watch it do that this is just a screenshot of it and it will

2. 47:20

   open multiple of these so you could i was doing a search the other day saying like hey tell me all the autobiographies i haven't bought on amazon put them into my you know shopping cart and summarize each of them because i like biographies and i like i'm doing here and when it did this last time it put my flight into like and i was logged in under my account and it basically put it into my account in the checkout so again this isn't like if you're a developer you do this all day long but this really seems to be a new product category i'm curious if you guys have played with it yet and then what your thoughts are on having an agentic browser like this available to you to be doing these tasks in real time you can also connect obviously your gmail your calendar to it so i did a a search tell me every restaurant i've been to and then put it by city and then i was going to

3. 48:16

   open my open table and then pull that data as well what's interesting about this keith and i know you're a product guy and done a lot of product work i'm curious your thoughts on it is you don't have to do this in the cloud. You're authenticated already into a lot of your accounts, nor do you have to worry about being blocked by these services because it doesn't look like a scraper or a bot. It's just that you're a browser doing the work. Your thoughts on this? Have you played with it at all? Yep. I think it's a great Hail Mary attempt by perplexity. I think up since something like this, perplexity is toast. For the stat about chat GPT is going to a billion users, like it's becoming the verb, you know, the way you describe using AI for a normal consumer, there's nothing left of perplexity if they can't pull this off. So it's a great idea because like

4. 49:04

   the history of like consumer technology companies is whoever's up has uphill ground, like in a military sense, whoever's first has a lot of control. This is actually what Google should be doing truthfully. Like I think Google's also Google search cross search is toast. And since they have chrome and they theoretically have a quality team in gemini they should be putting these two things together and hoping to compete with chad gpt they are going to lose the search game like the assets their best at google right now have nothing to do with search it's every other product is the only thing that's going to save that company if they can figure out how to use them travis your thoughts on this category anything come to mind for you in terms of you know feature sets that would be extraordinary here i know you like to think about products and

5. 49:51

   the consumer experience it's really interesting so you know i've been spending as you guys know i've been spending my time on real estate and construction and robotics and so i've been out of the this kind of consumer software game for a long time but super interesting over the last six months there have been a number of consumer software ceos like when i hang out with them or whatever they're like yo how are we gonna how are we gonna keep doing what we do when the agents take over yeah the paradigm shift is so profound that the idea that you would visit a web page goes away and you're just in a chat you have an agent that's just taking care of your flights for you. So I, I kind of, I think there's a leapfrog over that. I think it's just like you tell something, yo, I want to go to New York. Can you, you know, I'm sort of looking at this time range.

6. 50:47

   Can you just go find something I'm probably going to like and give me a couple of options. Yeah. And it's just a whole, you have an interface and then, you know, is perplexed, is this thing that you just showed him perplexedly, is that the interface or do I just have an agent that just goes and does everything for me. And is this the start of that? You know, I just haven't spent enough time. I do know that every consumer software CEO that has an app in the app store is tripping.

7. 51:19

   They're tripping right now. And I mean, big boys. I mean, guys with real stuff. And sometimes I'm doing like, almost like therapy sessions with them. I'm like, it's going to be fine. You actually have stuff. You have a moat. you have real stuff that's of value. They can't replace it with an agent. So you're lying to them. You're doing hospice care and you're telling them everything's going to be okay, but the patient's not missing out of line options on Robin Hood while he's like, yeah, yeah, tell me more, tell me more.

8. 51:46

   Yeah, he's supporting all these things. There's certain things that are protected and there's certain things that aren't. That's all. Well, Tramath, let's talk about that because you and I are old enough to remember General Magic. This vision was out there a long time ago with personal... digital assistants, and you would just talk to an agent, it would go do this for you. This feels like a step to that, where it does all the work for you, presents you the final moment and says approve.

9. 52:12

   So look, I think you're a butler. Yeah, I think what you're describing is what we want. But I think more specifically for today, Keith and Travis, totally nail it. Look, I think building a browser is an absolutely stupid capital allocation decision. just totally stupid and unjustifiable in 2025. Specifically for perplexity, I think their path to building a legacy business is to replace Bloomberg. Everything that they've done in financial information and financial data, in going beyond the model, has been excellent.

10. 52:49

    As somebody who's paid $25,000 to Bloomberg for many years, the terminal is atrocious. it's terrible it's not very good it's very limited and anybody that could build a better product would take over a hundred billion dollar enterprise because i think it's there for the taking i wish that perplexity would double and triple down on that and so when you see this kind of random sprawl let's do it let's just go do it when you do the random sprawl i think it doesn't work but i just want to say like a browser is like the dumbest thing to build in 2025 because in a world of agents what is a browser it's a glorified markup reader it's like handling html it's handling css and javascript it's doing some networking it's doing some security it's doing some rendering but it's like this is all under the water type stuff i get it that we had to deal

11. 53:47

    with all that nonsense in 1998 to try lycos or google for the first time but in 2025 there's something that you just speak to and eventually there's probably something that's in your brain which you just think and it just doesn't you're thinking i need a flight to jfk or at the maximum today in a very elegant beautiful search bar you type in get me a flight and it already knows what to do. Keith, in some ways, this is a step towards that ultimate vision. So you'd think