[04:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=299s) 巨头的创新者窘境与 AI 原生浏览器的定义
针对 Perplexity 提出以 345 亿美元收购 Chrome 的新闻,Guru 幽默地表示,对于一家 B2C 公司而言,这种做法“没有任何坏处”(Zero Downside),因为“注意力就是你所需要的一切”(Attention is all you need)。如果谷歌因反垄断等原因被迫剥离 Chrome,这甚至可能成为一次真正的机会。Gen Digital 的首席 AI 与创新官 Howie 同样认为,谷歌正处于一个非常有趣的时期:一方面其搜索业务受到严重威胁,另一方面它本身也是强大的 AI 提供商。
Howie 透露,他在一年前加入 Gen Digital 并启动了 AI 浏览器项目 **Norton Neo**(于今年 5 月推出)。他将目前的 AI 浏览器市场比作 1997 年的搜索引擎市场,虽然商业模式和最终的产品形态仍需时间摸索,但变革的方向是确定的。Guru 也同意这一观点,并指出未来 2 到 3 年内,我们将看到初创公司、大型 AI 实验室(如传闻中正在开发浏览器的 OpenAI)以及试图自我重塑的巨头之间展开激烈的竞争。
- **Norton Neo**:Gen Digital 于今年 5 月推出的 AI 浏览器,主打安全、隐私与 AI 的深度融合。
- **用户习惯的改变**:Guru 提到,他现在遇到不懂的概念(如量子计算)时,第一反应不再是去谷歌搜索,而是直接在 Claude 中提问,5 秒钟内就能获得完美的总结。
- **竞争维度的升维**:桌面端的 Claude 或 ChatGPT 实际上已经在与传统浏览器争夺用户的注意力入口。未来的浏览器必须在语音交互、更强的安全性、自动化和发现能力上带来“革命性”而非“渐进式”的体验提升。
[19:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=1199s) The Level Playing Field for AI Browser Startups
While there are rumors that Anthropic is developing its own browser, Guru Chahal remains tight-lipped, saying, "That I cannot comment on." However, he openly expresses his deep admiration for the Anthropic team, calling them "the best team that is pushing the frontiers of intelligence" in a way that is safe, secure, trustworthy, and interpretable. These qualities are particularly vital to enterprise-focused investors like Chahal and Howie Xu. Chahal believes there is a massive future in applying cognitive intelligence to enterprise settings, predicting that Anthropic will continue experimenting with new ways to connect their models to enterprise data and automate actions. Whether that takes the form of a browser is ultimately up to Anthropic's Chief Product Officer, Mike Krieger, and his team.
When asked if the AI browser space will be dominated solely by tech giants or if startups stand a chance, Chahal is highly optimistic about the latter. He argues that startups have a completely level playing field, largely because Chromium—the underlying engine of Google Chrome—is open source. While building a browser from scratch 15 years ago would have been an impossibly tall task due to the sheer diversity of the internet, Chromium provides a ready-made foundation. Startups can use it as a building block and focus entirely on rethinking the user interface, the system of engagement, security, and AI-driven automation.
To prove his point, Chahal shares a story from his and Xu's cybersecurity backgrounds. Five or six years ago, a few founders decided to build a secure enterprise browser. The gut reaction from many in the industry was skeptical, assuming Chrome and Safari had the market entirely locked down. Yet, Chahal and Xu were lead investors in a startup called Talon, which built its product on Chromium and was quickly acquired by Palo Alto Networks, where it is now an extraordinarily large business. Another startup, Island, is seeing similar massive success. Xu agrees that startups have a massive opportunity, noting that while Google might have secret projects outside of Chrome, it is incredibly difficult for a dominant giant to shift its core application. "It's actually time for them or me," Xu says, referring to the nimbler players who do not have legacy market share to protect.
- **Chromium as an Equalizer:** Because Chromium is open source, startups do not have to build a browser engine from scratch; they can focus their engineering on UI, security, and AI integration.
- **Talon:** A Chromium-based secure enterprise browser startup co-funded by Chahal and Xu, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks.
- **Island:** Another highly successful startup in the enterprise browser space built on Chromium.
---
[24:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=1499s) How AI Agents Will Completely Disrupt Search
The discussion shifts to how AI browsers will disrupt the massive advertising and search engines that power giants like Google and Meta. Google famously pays Apple tens of billions of dollars annually—amounting to roughly 36% of the search ad revenue Google generates from Safari traffic—just to remain the default search engine. Chahal argues that looking at this purely through the lens of ad revenue is too narrow. Instead, he asks a bigger question: "What is search in this brave new world that we are going in?" Historically, humans have used search as a discovery mechanism, typing queries like "Hawaii great hotels" into a search bar and clicking through "10 blue links" one by one. Chahal bets there is "zero chance" humans will still be searching this way in five to ten years.
Instead, users will simply tell a trusted AI agent or browser, "I'm thinking of going to Hawaii, what do you think?" The search will still happen, but it will be pushed one layer down, delegated entirely to the AI. Today's search industry is built on the assumption of an impatient human with imperfect querying abilities who gets overwhelmed by too many links, which is why search engines settled on displaying exactly ten results. An AI agent does not have these human limitations. Chahal shares that one of their portfolio companies, XAI, is building a search engine specifically designed for AI agents.
To illustrate the difference, Chahal contrasts the frustrating human experience of opening 11 different tabs to compare hotels with how an AI agent operates. An AI agent does not care about tabs. It makes a single query to fetch 100 hotels, pulls all the associated metadata and reviews in "one shot," jams it into its context window, filters it based on what it knows about the user's preferences and real-time room availability, and presents three perfect options. "The threat to search is not just the browser moving from Chrome to Neo," Chahal explains. "The bigger threat to search is the fact that it's not a human searching anymore."
- **Google's Safari Deal:** Alphabet pays Apple billions of dollars annually to secure its default search status, representing 36% of its Safari search ad revenue.
- **XAI:** A portfolio company building a search engine optimized specifically for AI agents rather than human searchers.
- **The AI Search Flow:** Instead of opening multiple tabs, an AI agent requests massive metadata in a single query, processes it instantly in a context window, and delivers highly personalized recommendations.
---
[29:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=1799s) The Trap of the Legacy Business Model
Xu strongly agrees with Chahal's vision of the future and shares a historical anecdote from a podcast about Google's early days. In 1997, before Google officially launched, Larry Page visited a search company called Excite. Excite's team tested Google's search technology against their own and found Google's results to be vastly superior, with the very first link being highly relevant. Surprisingly, Excite's CEO rejected acquiring the technology and "basically said get out of the room." The reason was their business model: Excite relied on banner ads, meaning they wanted users to stay on their page as long as possible. If the first link was too perfect, users would leave immediately, shrinking Excite's ad revenue.
This story highlights a classic innovator's dilemma. Today, Google finds itself in a similar trap. Because they must report billions of dollars in ad revenue to Wall Street every quarter, they cannot easily abandon the ad-based search model, even if AI makes it obsolete. Chahal explains this dynamic through the relationship between product and business model. In a market's early days, a great product is built first, and a business model is "bolted on" to serve the product. Over time, as a company achieves tremendous success, the dynamic reverses: the product begins to serve the business model.
This is why Google Search has become increasingly cluttered with sponsored links that look identical to organic results. Chahal notes that on mobile, he sometimes has to scroll past two full screens of sponsored results just to find an actual search query, prompting him to use Anthropic's Claude instead. "That's because they have a product serving the business model," Chahal says. This friction is precisely why venture capital exists. Startups do not have to worry about protecting a legacy multi-billion-dollar ad business; they can focus entirely on building the absolute best product.
- **The Excite Anecdote:** In 1997, Excite rejected Larry Page's superior search technology because its highly accurate results would decrease user time-on-site and hurt banner ad revenue.
- **Product vs. Business Model:** Early-stage startups build business models to serve their products, whereas mature giants force their products to serve their legacy business models.
---
[34:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=2099s) The Three Phases of AI-Native Browsers
Xu outlines his framework for the evolution of AI-native browsers, which he views as a three-phase journey. Phase one is the merger of chat and search into a single, unified experience. Users should not have to navigate to Google for search and another platform for chat; they need a single interface that handles direct navigation, search, and chat seamlessly. Xu notes that his company's product, Neo Browser, has already successfully completed this phase.
Phase two introduces a highly proactive and personalized browser experience. Instead of acting as a passive window to the web, the browser acts like a "Superman sitting next to you," browsing along, memorizing details, and proactively offering assistance. For example, if a user browses an F1 racing page, the browser might proactively notify them of an upcoming F1 event two days later, or automatically summarize content across 50 different websites. Neo Browser is currently focused on delivering this personalized, proactive value.
Phase three is the fully "agentic" browser, capable of executing complex, multi-step actions like booking a complete vacation to Hawaii. While some in the industry believe startups should jump straight to phase three, Xu is cautious. He argues that the technology is not yet reliable enough for high-stakes actions. "If I want to buy an iPhone cover on Amazon, I wouldn't trust the agentic browser to do that yet," Xu explains, because an error rate of even 10% could result in the browser accidentally purchasing an expensive iPhone instead of a cheap cover. He estimates that reliable, widespread agentic actions are still 12 to 18 months away. In the meantime, the biggest challenge for developers in phase two is balancing proactivity with user experience, ensuring the AI assistant is helpful without becoming annoying.
- **Phase 1 (Unified Interface):** The integration of search, chat, and direct navigation into a single user experience.
- **Phase 2 (Proactive & Personalized):** An AI companion that remembers user interests, summarizes web pages in the background, and offers proactive notifications.
- **Phase 3 (Agentic Action):** A browser capable of executing complex transactions and workflows, expected to mature over the next 12 to 18 months.
[39:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=2399s) The Browser as the AI Operating System and the Future of Voice
The conversation shifts to how consumers will adapt to new AI models in phases, starting with easy-to-adopt features, moving to depersonalization, and finally reaching action-oriented capabilities. This evolution prompts the idea that the browser is poised to become much more than a simple window to the internet; it is transforming into an "AI operating system" for our lives—agentic, proactive, and a true partner that seamlessly combines chat, search, and brainstorming. While some express excitement about this agentic future, others note that high-accuracy automation is still 18 months away, even though basic agentic workflows are already here.
The speakers debate the role of voice technology in this new paradigm. While voice technology has improved tremendously over the last 12 months in terms of latency, cost, and naturalness, actual user adoption on desktop browsers remains low. On mobile, people are accustomed to voice, but talking to a laptop still feels unnatural to many. Furthermore, the technical and user-experience bars for voice are incredibly high. If a user has a specialized accent or works in a domain like medicine or finance, the system must understand their terminology in real time. Users also need to see their words typed out instantly to gain confidence in the system, rather than waiting for a long pause at the end of a sentence.
- **Voice Accuracy Bar:** A threshold of 95% accuracy is not enough for professional or specialized domains; it must be near-perfect and real-time.
- **Technology Readiness:** The industry has eliminated "technology readiness" as an excuse for poor voice adoption, but finding the right habit-forming use cases remains the primary challenge.
---
[44:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=2699s) Multimodality and the Death of Static Web Layouts
The discussion turns to visual interaction models. Today, the entire browser engagement model relies on pre-laid-out websites with static images and text. In the future, AI could generate an entire output—whether it is a video, an image, a mind map, or text—customized in real time for an individual's specific cognitive style. However, generating high-quality images and videos is currently expensive, unpredictable, and suffers from high latency. Despite these hurdles, teams are already demonstrating "infinite games" in the gaming sector, where worlds are generated in real time faster than wall clock time.
Looking 10 years into the future, the speakers predict that the current way we use browsers will seem "totally unbelievably wrong." Instead of being forced to consume static text or video just because a news outlet like CNN or Fox News formatted it that way, the browser will act as a real-time translation layer between the source data and the user's preferred format. If a user is driving, a technical paper can be converted into a podcast. If they prefer visual learning, two avatars can be generated on the fly to debate the paper as a custom YouTube-style video. Google's Notebook LM is highlighted as a brilliant early example of this shift.
- **Notebook LM:** Cited as an incredibly well-done product that converts papers, blogs, and press releases into highly engaging, podcast-style audio.
- **Infinite Generation:** Real-time video generation is emerging in gaming, where the environment is generated continuously as the player moves.
---
[49:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=2999s) Privacy, Trust, and the Cognitive Burden of Data Control
With the rise of AI-powered browsers, concerns about centralized user data collection, privacy, and governance come to the forefront. The speakers note that while some users demand convenience and are willing to send any data to a model provider to get the best answer, others are highly sensitive about prompt retention. To address this, browsers like Norton Neo are designed to act as the "Signal of the browser world," keeping prompts saved strictly on the user's local device rather than a cloud server.
However, the concepts of security, privacy, trust, and alignment are deeply intertwined. Because AI requires deep access to a user's life to be highly effective, the temptation to share data is incredibly strong. While cybersecurity experts are careful about sandboxing their data, the average consumer faces too much "cognitive burden" to parcel out information to various agents. Most users outside of Silicon Valley do not read permission screens when logging in with Google; they simply want frictionless utility.
- **The Signal Analogy:** Norton Neo aims to offer a high-privacy, local-first configuration, acting as a secure enclave for user prompts.
- **The Privacy Paradox:** If consumers truly prioritized privacy over convenience, a privacy-focused search engine would be the dominant global player instead of Google. "People like to talk about privacy, but at the end of the day, they want to just do what they want to do."
---
[54:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=3299s) Shifting Business Models and Startup Opportunities
Historically, internet consumers have been highly resistant to paying for digital services, relying instead on free, ad-supported models like Gmail. However, the sheer utility of AI has broken this decades-long habit, with millions of users now willingly swiping their credit cards to pay $20 a month for services like Anthropic or OpenAI. While the long-term winning business model for AI browsers remains to be discovered—whether it is subscriptions, ads, or premium security features—the current willingness to pay provides a strong signal of AI's immense value.
When looking at startup opportunities over the next five to ten years, the most exciting prospects are businesses that simply "could not have been built three years ago." Rather than making incremental improvements to existing software, founders should focus on things that were previously economically or technically impossible—such as instantly summarizing thousands of pages of financial disclosures. The session wraps up with a bold prediction: the browser war is wide open, and AI operating systems like Neo have the potential to completely disrupt established giants like Chrome.
- **Consumer Spending Shift:** Users who historically never paid for software are now subscribing to multiple AI tools simultaneously.
- **The "Why Now" Test for Startups:** The best startup opportunities leverage capabilities (like deep document synthesis) that were technically or economically unfeasible prior to recent LLM breakthroughs.
[59:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=3599s) The Browser as the Future Operating System
The discussion shifts to the revolutionary potential of the browser, which is heralded as "the future of the operating system." The vision involves a browser capable of working seamlessly with 60 million applications, opening up massive startup opportunities for hosting on Neo over the next decade. By pushing the frontiers of what a browser can do, this technology is poised to enable an entirely new class of applications. This evolution is compared to the historical integration of JavaScript into browsers, which paved the way for Ajax, Gmail, and the modern web ecosystem.
The speakers note that having AI agents working directly within the browser will serve as a powerful engine for lead generation, specifically benefiting venture capital efforts like Lightspeed. The sheer utility of this setup prompts an enthusiastic declaration of intent to subscribe and pay for the browser. The excitement is palpable as they contemplate how these browser-level innovations will reshape the software ecosystem and user interaction.
- **60 Million Applications:** The scale of integration envisioned for the browser-based operating system of the future.
- **Neo Hosting:** A major area of startup opportunity identified for the next ten years.
- **Historical Parallel:** The shift is compared to how JavaScript and Ajax enabled the creation of Gmail and modern web apps.
[01:00:35](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=3635s) The Mystery of Anthropic and Final Wrap-Up
As the conversation winds down, the moderator brings up a lingering question about why there is so little public noise from Anthropic. While keeping specific details under wraps, the speaker expresses immense admiration for the company, describing them as "an incredible company" with a team of the sharpest and most thoughtful people they have ever worked with. At this stage in their careers, the speaker emphasizes that it is all about working with incredible people who challenge and push their own worldview, concluding with a teasing "stay tuned" for what is to come.
The episode wraps up with mutual gratitude for the discussion and a shared hope that the audience gains a deeper understanding of the future of AI and its potential to change the world. The hosts close out by encouraging viewers to like, comment, and support their channel, Quayquo101, promising to return next week with more cutting-edge content.
- **Anthropic's Team:** Described as an incredibly sharp, thoughtful bunch of people who push boundaries and challenge established ways of thinking.
- **Career Philosophy:** The speaker notes that at this point in their career, the primary joy comes from collaborating with exceptional individuals.
- **Channel Sign-off:** A call to action for viewers to support Quayquo101 for the best up-to-date tech and AI content.
## Notable quotes
> [04:59](https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1L2h9zzEA3?t=299s) 注意力就是你所需要的一切(Attention is all you need)。 — Guru Chahal
Perplexity向谷歌发起收购要约 引爆AI浏览器控制权争夺战
Chromium开源生态与AI Agent正在彻底颠覆传统搜索广告模式,浏览器将取代操作系统成为AI时代的核心流量入口与自动化执行中枢。
本期对话围绕AI浏览器这一全新流量入口展开。嘉宾们指出,浏览器已取代操作系统成为人机交互的核心卡口,而谷歌因深陷每年800亿美元Chrome广告营收的“创新者困境”而难以激进变革。Perplexity、Anthropic、Gen Digital(推出Norton Neo)等力量正通过开源的Chromium生态加速入局,推动浏览器从“AI辅助”向“AI原生”及“Agent化”演进。未来,AI Agent将代替人类进行多渠道信息整合与决策,彻底颠覆传统的“10个蓝色链接”搜索模式。
Perplexity 提出以 345 亿美元收购 Chrome,释放出人机交互重心从操作系统向 AI 浏览器转移的强烈信号,浏览器正在成为数据收集与执行自动化的核心卡口。 (0:00)
谷歌深陷“创新者窘境”,每年约 800 亿美元的广告营收直接依赖 Chrome 导致其难以颠覆界面;而 Chromium 的开源生态则为初创团队提供了重新设计交互与 AI 架构的公平起跑线。 (4:59)
未来的搜索逻辑将被 AI Agent 彻底重塑,Agent 将通过单次查询获取海量元数据并在上下文窗口中即时过滤决策,用户不再需要逐个点击“10个蓝色链接”。 (24:59)
AI 原生浏览器的演进将历经“统一搜索与对话”、“主动个性化陪伴”至“全自主 Agent”三阶段,未来更将作为实时翻译层,把网页静态内容动态重构为播客或视频等个性化格式。 (34:59)
Reading summary
Lightspeed 投资合伙人 Guru Chahal 与 Gen Digital 首席 AI 与创新官 Howie Xu 指出,人机交互重心已系统性地从操作系统迁移至浏览器,AI 正在从底层颠覆传统的搜索和内容消费逻辑;而传统巨头深陷广告商业模式的“创新者窘境”,这为基于开源架构打造 AI 原生浏览器的初创团队带来了历史性的洗牌契机。
巨头陷入商业模式束缚与创新者窘境 (4:59)
Guru 认为,过去 20 到 25 年间,安全、数据收集和应用运行等交互系统功能已全面转移到浏览器,使其成为 AI 交互与自动化的关键卡口。针对 Perplexity 提议以 345 亿美元收购 Chrome 的传闻,嘉宾指出这反映出巨头受制于存量利益的困局:谷歌每年约 4000 亿美元营收中,有约 800 亿美元直接源自 Chrome,对界面的任何微调都牵动巨大营收,导致其即便明知 AI 原生形态也难以做出激进变革。
Howie 预测,十年后 Chrome 将难以维持目前 70% 以上的市场份额。他以 1997 年搜索公司 Excite 因担忧损害横幅广告时长而拒绝 Larry Page 的优质搜索技术为例,指出谷歌正面临相同的陷阱:为满足财报预期,搜索结果页面充斥着赞助商链接,迫使寻求高效答案的用户转向 Claude 等新型交互工具。
搜索主体变更:从点击蓝链到代理委托 (24:59)
谷歌每年向苹果支付数十亿美元以维持其在 Safari 上的默认搜索引擎地位(占其 Safari 搜索广告收入的约 36%),但 Guru 认为纯粹从广告费审视过于狭隘。未来五到十年内,人类几乎不可能再通过在搜索栏输入关键词、逐一比对“十条蓝色链接”并打开十几个标签页的方式来检索信息,搜索功能将被下沉一层,全权委托给受信任的 AI 代理。
这一变革的本质是“搜索主体不再是人类”。传统搜索体验受限于人类注意力与查询能力的不足,而 AI 代理可以发起单次请求抓取上百条数据的完整元数据与评价,在上下文窗口内完成过滤比对,直接输出最优解。目前,如 xAI 等投资组合公司已经在专门构建面向 AI Agent 而非人类搜索者的专用搜索引擎。
原生浏览器的三阶段演进与交互变革 (34:59)
Howie 提出了 AI 原生浏览器的三阶段演进框架:第一阶段是整合搜索与对话的统一界面(如 Norton Neo 已实现);第二阶段是打造高度主动化与个性化的数字伴侣,能在后台记忆偏好并主动提供跨网站摘要与提醒;第三阶段则是完全代理化(Agentic),可跨网站代用户执行复杂交易。Howie 强调,目前技术精度尚不足以承担高风险操作(哪怕 10% 的错误率在实际消费中也无法承受),高可靠性的自动化普及预计仍需 12 到 18 个月。
在内容呈现上,未来的浏览器将打破由网站预设的静态排版,充当源数据与用户认知风格之间的实时翻译层。例如,借助类似 Google NotebookLM 的多模态能力,浏览器可将严肃论文即时重组为播客对话、脑图或动态视频。而在语音交互方面,尽管桌面端模型延迟显著下降,但受限于专业领域的极高准确率要求和用户使用习惯,全面普及仍需时间。
开源底座降低门槛与商业模式重构 (19:59)
针对初创公司能否与科技巨头抗衡的问题,Guru 指出开源的 Chromium 抹平了竞争底座。创作者无需耗费巨资从零构建排版引擎,而能将工程资源集中在 UI 重构、安全机制与 AI 工作流上。此前两人主导投资的企业安全浏览器 Talon(已被 Palo Alto Networks 收购)以及 Island 的快速崛起,证明了垂直浏览器初创模式的可行性。
在商业模式端,AI 的实用价值打破了互联网用户长期依赖免费广告产品的习惯,数百万人正在每月支付 20 美元订阅费。而在隐私层面,虽然 Norton Neo 等产品尝试通过本地存储 Prompt 打造“浏览器界的 Signal”,但多数大众消费者往往因认知负担过重,依然倾向于以隐私换取便捷体验。初创企业的核心机会在于构建三年前在经济或技术上无法实现的能力。
对话嘉宾认为,AI 浏览器正从被动的网页查看器进化为能够调度千万级应用的“AI 操作系统”。这场新一轮浏览器大战的终局仍未确定,初创团队能否真正打破垄断,取决于 Agentic 自动化可靠性的成熟速度、用户在隐私与便利性之间的取舍,以及能否在免受传统广告模式掣肘的前提下跑通全新的商业生态。
Source quotes
[4:59] Guru Chahal: 注意力就是你所需要的一切(Attention is all you need)。
[4:59] Howie Xu: 真正的AI浏览器不应只是加一个“总结此页面”的按钮,而是要从零开始重新思考。
[24:59] Guru Chahal: 对搜索的威胁不仅在于浏览器从Chrome转移到Neo,更大的威胁在于进行搜索的不再是人类了。
[29:59] Guru Chahal: 在市场早期,伟大的产品先被创造出来,商业模式是‘套在’产品之上的;而当公司获得巨大成功后,动态会反过来:产品开始为商业模式服务。
[34:59] Howie Xu: 如果我想在亚马逊上买一个iPhone手机壳,我目前还不敢信任Agent浏览器去帮我买,因为哪怕10%的错误率也可能导致它帮我买成一部昂贵的iPhone。
[49:59] Howie Xu: 人们喜欢谈论隐私,但归根结底,他们只想做他们想做的事(更看重便利性)。
[54:59] Guru Chahal: 初创公司最令人兴奋的机会,是那些在三年前根本不可能被建立起来的业务。
[60:35] Guru Chahal: (Anthropic)是一间令人难以置信的公司,拥有我所合作过的最聪明、最深思熟虑的一群人。
Original transcript
[0:00] 在硅谷很多人认为谷歌将掉队了我们在过了一段时间第一个人已经掉了所以谁是接下来你会在那些商业模式然后商业会在商业模式网络的户口是真实的方位中旬AI搜索独教授公司Perplexity称要以345亿美元的价格收购谷歌的Chrome浏览器要知道这个报价几乎是Perplexity自身估值的两倍之多所以问题来了这是纯炒作还是真的有舌吞向的可能性呢哎等一下Perplexy之前不是说他还要买TikTok吗那随着AI agent赛大的火热和能力增强AI browser这个词呢让浏览器这个过去数年都没人讨论的词呢又在刹那间变成了硅谷的科技相波波就在我们写稿之间Androbic是发布了浏览器产品Cloud for Chrome是正式的入局了那么AI浏览器之战真的要来了吗它意味着什么样的新机会搜索万一级的生意会如何被颠覆呢大家好欢迎收看硅谷101我是陈倩关注我们不要错过全球最深度的科技与商业内容和我们一起从这里实现未来那么这期视频我非常的开心与Lightspeed Venture Partners的合伙人Guru Chahol他正是Anthropic的领头投资人以及Gen Digital的首席AI级创新官Howe一起探讨一下新一轮的浏览器大战那在上一代浏览器大战中Firefox Google Chrome Microsoft EdgeSafari与Opera是市场中主要的竞争者这几大玩家的市场份额在近年来是变得非常的稳定直到AI的出现但是怎么去定义一个AI浏览器呢?第一个问题帮我们解决一下什么是AI的规短Guru,为什么不开始开始?我觉得它回到一个很简单的原理过去20年其实多于25年 systematically the system of engagement for a human or a user with computing has moved away from the operating system into the browser. So everything that was relevant at the operating system layer is now also relevant at the browser layer. We used to use operating systems primarily as a mechanism for security, observability, gathering data, running applications, all of that now happens inside the browser. And so my going-in thesis becomes the primary mechanism for AI to interact with tools that were designed for humans is also going to be the browser. That then becomes an interesting choke point where you collect data, where you do automation, where you secure AI to systems interactions, and so on. So that's sort of the framing that we use. We're already investors in this space, as I was sharing with Howie earlier. A few years ago, we saw some incredible teams building enterprise browsers, so a version of the browser that, say, Lightspeed would feel comfortable running because our IT team and our security teams can then control what can and cannot be done inside the browser. So we invested in a company called Talon, which was then acquired by PowerAlto Networks, and we were the lead investors there. and we saw how quickly that entire market developed into a very large enterprise browser market today. And I think the thing we are going to debate today is whether AI becomes another reason for a net new class of browsers to emerge and become a large market. So I'm excited. Yeah, I think when the Talon acquisition happened, AI wasn't the reason, right? That's right, it was cybersecurity. There are other reasons, you know, that happens. But that's an interesting thing still is, you know, we haven't seen acquisition of a browser technology for a long time. Suddenly, browser is an interesting technology. You and I know each other for so long. We discussed so many things, but we never discussed a browser in the last 20 years. And then when I saw this article from Guru, I was like, what? You know, he's interested in a browser. Now you explained it, Your initial interest in browser was this enterprise browser. It makes a lot of sense. But now you're interested in AI browser. Why are you interested in AI browser? So it comes from sort of two key realizations and a foundational belief. Our foundational belief here at Lightspeed is that foundational models and AI in general represent a brand new class of capabilities that bring cognitive labor, make cognitive labor accessible to technology. So for the first time ever since we've been in technology, machines can process language that is semi-structured, understand language, work with it, almost like a human would. So then the question becomes, okay, so
[4:59] What's the limit on this? One is, you know, how smart could models get? We believe we're barely scratching the surface and models will continue to get better. We're one of the largest investors in companies like Anthropic, as an example. So that's our core foundational belief. Now, on top of that, then the question becomes, what holds it back? If these models get really intelligent, what holds you back? And essentially, two things hold you back. A model's ability to absorb data and learn and do a better job in an enterprise setting. So observe and learn. And two, to actually take action, do something. So to access. And there is one piece of technology that is the universal window to both observe what's happening and also take action. And that becomes a browser. because almost I suspect how we before you came to this meeting or over the last many years 95% of what you do on a laptop or a computer you're doing through the browser which means if I was the browser I would know exactly what you're doing and all the software you're interacting with and I would be then presumably be able to interact with the software in that same way now it not 100 we have desktop applications too but if you going to start somewhere you would start at the browser And I think that why browsers were always very strategic real estate which is why Google did the entire Chrome project. I mean, think about it. The only reason they did Chrome was because they wanted to own search. But it was such a strategic real estate that in the age of AI, it is several orders of magnitude more important. And so that's why this renewed interest in browser, that it addresses those two key things. It enables you to gather data in a passive, continuous way, and it helps you to take action continuously as both a co-pilot, but also as an autonomous agent that can do work on your behalf. That's what we're talking about. So to the first news, Perplexity wants to buy Google Chrome. This thing may be Perplexity before saying to sell TikTok a little bit more. But Chrome, even though it's not worth its quality and weight, it's also Perplexity. So this news is more like a criminal strategy, but also also gives a signal, that Perplexity thinks AI will be the next one going to be a big game This year Perplexity is announced the AI product Comet目前支持Windows和MacOS后续计划扩展到Linux Android和iOS系统目前这款AI浏览器指向每个月支付200美元的高端Perplexity Max用户开放其他用户就只能加入它的Witless申请了所以我还没有用上不过从公开资料上来看Comet是一款内建了AI助手的浏览器产品可以在编栏中持续的提供帮助不需要频繁切换标签支持网页搜索 内容总结预定会议 编写邮件等多种任务同时还能够让AI agent帮用户在网页上自动去点击输入提交表单比如说去完整的完成购物流程此外这款AI浏览器还支持利用功能让AI参考你当前打开的标签页内容保持提问的上下文相关性可在任意网页上高量词句以获得及时解释支持多角度提问最后他还支持从这样内容研究翻译到日程管理和多平台联动 agent agent I was talking to Haoyi the other day, the news that perplexity makes a long shot,34.5 billion US dollars offer for Chrome. What's your reaction when firstly reading the news? so we're not investors in perplexity so we don't have any more data than the two of you do but i will say one thing there is zero downside to doing something to saying something like that zero downside right so if it doesn't happen you got great buzz and at the end of the day perplexity is a b2c business so anything that gets you more attention attention is all you need is all you need that is i love it so attention is all you need so what's the downside there is zero downside And on the absolute sort of small probability upside, maybe there is a situation where Google is either forced or wants to divest Chrome, in which case, why not make a play for it? And so I see that as a very clever, very smart thing that perplexity put out there. Look, you know, I'm right now a chief AI officer at a public company. You know, if not, I would have bid for that, too. Why not? Right.
[9:59] You know, Guru may be supporting me too bit for that. Who knows, right? So I totally agree with Guru in that, you know, there is a zero downside. And if nothing else, you know, the worst case is tremendous amount of the attention, right? I think Google is going through a very interesting time. On the one hand, search business is under attack. For me personally, I don't use Google search nearly as much as I did before. I can only see that that's going to be more and more true for the mass population in the next 5, 10 years. So that's a big threat to Google. But at the same time, they are also an AI provider. They also have a lot of smart engineers. So it's kind of a very interesting time. But since today we are focusing on the browser war, obviously Chrome is 70% market share plus, right? I mean, it's the kind of the gorilla in this market. I personally see that browser war is real. Ten years from now, the default browser for 70% of people is not going to be Chrome, not even close. The reason is very simple for the reason that Guru just mentioned Today if you think about Google revenue roughly billion a year And then you know search is a big part of that A big part of that is actually sourced from Chrome. So anything they do with Chrome, it has tremendous impact to the revenue immediately. So there are many different reports, but, you know, the consensus is roughly speaking, $80 billion of that $400 billion is directly, directly from Chrome. So if I change the Chrome user interface, I'm changing $80 billion, right? How many companies with $80 billion revenue in the entire world? And I think about it, right? So this is like a big deal. So I think that they are going through this, you know, innovators dilemma. It's not like they don't know what AI native browser should look like. They don't know, you know, the thesis that a guru was talking about with AI, I should be able to help the user to do browsing or to access the digital universe much easier, but they cannot possibly do too much kind of a change. So this is kind of a from first principle point of view, that's pretty obvious. You know, when I talk to people internal, it's also the same thing. They literally told me that my hands are tied, right? You know, I cannot do a lot You know I know what to do but you know my hands are tied So in a way this is very interesting that we are going through a period that the number one guy is gone that my assumption for the next 10 years so then who's the next right you know perplexity obviously has a comet there's a deer you wrote up these two browsers in your article which i disagree is you should have put my browser ahead of these two uh with all the kidding aside i think all of us are at the very beginning right Comet, Deer, Norton, Neil, you know, this is kind of, let me just give a very brief introduction, right? I actually joined the Gen Digital about a year ago as a chief AI and the innovation officer. And among many other things I do, you know, I kind of started this AI browser project a year ago, with pretty much, I don't want to repeat what you said, everything you said is what we, you know, saw at Gen Digital, right? The browser needs AI component big time, not just, hey, there's a button AI summarize this page. That's like AI assist, right? You know, I think the world needs an AI native browser. You know, you have to start from scratch, rethink about, right? In the past, it's like a human okay I want to go to CNN Fox News I click a link you know if browser give me that I going to use this browser That pretty much why Chrome even won over the Microsoft IE right You know, at some point, the JavaScript went much faster on Chrome. You know, that's why, you know, Chrome disrupted IE. But these days, I think that's, you still need that. But the way I interact with the digital universe shouldn't be like that. I know a link. The browser should know about me. the browser should bring the information to me even before I click the link. The browser should summarize or maybe even negotiate certain things or do whatever the task I wanted to do, right? It's not just agenda. The browser should be ahead of you rather than browser reacting to you. And it's very personalized. So there is so much you can do with that. So a year ago, we said, let's actually rethink about the browser. And then we started this project. And along the way, obviously, perplexity, you know, ARC, right? you know, these guys are, you know, probably thinking about the same line. And then the way I think of the browser today is a very much like search 1997. You know, I don't even think, you know, the future of the Google in this place is necessarily born or even there or maybe in garage. Right. But but I think the idea is there. Right. You know, Larry Page already started thinking about this. Right. Ninety seven, ninety eight, when he started.
[14:59] Google, this is where we are. As far as what's the business model, as far as what the product looks like exactly, I think it will take, you know, some time for us to learn and figure out. But there's no question that we would have a totally different browser. The browser shouldn't be, I click a link, give me the content. That's like nothing, right? You know, the browser should be my personal assistant giving me 10x productivity, helping me to do a lot of things 10x faster, right? How do you do this? So that's kind of how we think about it. Norton Neo was introduced in May this year. And we believe that with our sort of the execution in terms of bringing AI to the browser, the safety, privacy, we can talk more about it. I think consumers are going to love it and they're going to have totally different experience. If we look at the last episode of the AI-faceted news, you will find it very interesting. The winner of the Google winner is not the first time of the first time Although Google started to start to build a new website but the team spent 6 years ago to say to the CEO Eric Smith所以Chrome在2008年才问世基于开源项目Chromium与Safari所用的WebKit引擎打造在最开始Chrome并不被市场看好但是很快凭借谷歌对广告投放与品牌塑造的优势是迅速的崛起2011年年底Chrome是首次超越了Firefox市场份额达到了27%六个月之后又超过了IE与谷歌的搜索功能正式成为市场双霸主而在新一轮的AI浏览器大战开启之际我的问题是这会是初创企业的机会呢还是像大模型之战最后只会是巨头门的游戏呢How is that the number one guy will be goneGoogle probably won't be the leader in AI browserI think the landscape is wide openfor the first time in 15 yearsboth of the majorstrategic pieces of real estateGoogle ownsOne is search the other one is browserthe two most strategic pieces of real estateI think they own I think both are under threat I think the opportunity exists and it up to us to folks like Howie and others to think through how do you not just do something evolutionary slightly better, but revolutionary, right? You have to rethink the system of engagement. If your browser is only slightly faster, that was great for Chrome in the war with IE. It's not enough now, right? What is enough now is yet to be invented. It's a complete rethink of how that interaction of a human user with the worldwide web happens and what's the opportunity to rethink that portal through which we interact with the web. So I'm excited to see the innovation coming out in this. I'm really excited. I think for the first time, we're going to see something that is magical because that opportunity exists now. I think voice will be part of that, better security, more automation, easier discoverability, I think all of these things are up for grabs. That's excellent. You guys mentioned some AI browser products already, like perplexities. Comet. Comet. Deer. Not a Neo. Right. The rumor says OpenAI is going to launch its AI browser too I will bet that over the next two to three years we will see tremendous innovation and more browsers in this space We will see startups We will see large AI labs We will see certainly perhaps even companies like Google reinventing either Chrome or a net new browser in different ways. we're going through this darwinian sort of explosion of a complete change to how we interact with the world and i think to to to some extent even claude on your desktop or chat gpt on your desktop is competing with the browser to your point you know i couldn't agree more you said i'm using google less and less man i'm my first stop is not google for anything now When I'm looking for information, I'm in a meeting, somebody says quantum computing, I was like, I don't know anything about quantum computing. I don't go to Google and say, please tell me about quantum computing. I literally go to Claude and say, give me sort of a quick introduction to quantum computing. Five seconds later, I've got the perfect sort of write-up. I go through it and now I'm at least conversant in it. And so I think there's some fundamental changes happening. Browser is going to be a key part of that. I will not at all be surprised if OpenAI either develops their own or makes a
[19:59] for Chrome, it will happen. I think we'll see tremendous innovation in this space. While we have not heard the rumors that Anthropic is developing a browser, don't tell me no comment. That I cannot comment on. Look, as you both know, we are huge fans of Anthropic for a very simple reason. It's the best team that is pushing the frontiers of intelligence, but in a way that is safe, secure, trustworthy, interpretable. And these are things that matter to folks like Howie and I because of our enterprise roots. And so we think there's just a tremendous future in applying intelligence and cognitive intelligence, especially in enterprise settings. For sure, Enthropic will continue to experiment with new ways in which you can connect their models and their intelligence to both the data that an enterprise needs and also the actions that these models need to take to automate. Could that be a browser? Sure, but that's up to Mike Krieger, who's the CPO and his team. Right. Do you think the AI browser world will be the background for giants only or startups also have an opportunity Because we can see the LLM game is totally like big players game already A hundred percent startups have it a level playing field It a level playing field And the reason for that is actually interestingly the fact that Chromium which is the underlying engine inside Chrome, is open source. Maybe 15 years ago, I wouldn't have been so bold to say that a startup will just come out and write a browser from scratch. The reality is the internet is such a diverse place that supporting all the different types of things that you need to support to create a browser is a pretty tall task. But I'll give you the proof point for what makes me very bullish on new players emerging, not just the larger companies. Howie and I have a bit of a cybersecurity background as well. And about five or six years ago, a few founders decided there is an opportunity to build a brand new browser for enterprises that is secure. And you would have a blink reaction, say that people are Chrome or Safari or others, there's no way that's a real market. And the reality is we were lead investors in a company called Talent that got picked up extremely quickly by Palo Alto Networks and is now an extraordinarily large business inside Palo Alto Networks, which is a large cybersecurity company. There another company called Island which is also doing really well And so there is an opportunity for startups Both of these are startups They built this stuff off Chromium You can pick up Chromium as a startup engine as you start a building block and then rethink everything else about the user interface and the system of engagement, optimize for security, optimize for automation, optimize for AI in different ways and build something new. So I think the field is wide open. All right, Hali? Well, you know, I want to say it's only for small players However, I agree with Guru that Google may have a different project outside of Chrome. To me, that's a small player within a giant. That's possible. I just cannot see the giant, the number one player's current number one application is going to shift too much for the reason I just mentioned. I just don't see that possibility. I do see a possibility another interesting project surfaced. But usually, how it goes in a big company, it's tough. That's typical. So I would say that I might be biased, but I would say it's actually for people who doesn't have market share. It's actually time for them or me. Google search engine and Chrome watcher is two separate systems Search engine has managed to control over 90 of the world而Chrome浏览器呢则是握住了互联网的流量窗口为了守住这一双重的垄断结构谷歌呢不惜重金投入比如说谷歌母公司Alphabet每年呢都会向苹果支付数百亿美元只为让Google保持在Safari中的默认搜索地位你别看谷歌加大业的但是这几百亿美元就相当于谷歌从Safari流量中获取搜索广告收入的36%所以对于依靠广告和搜索为主要收入模式的谷歌来说也不但是谷歌还包括比如说依靠展示投放广告为主要收入的Mata以及其他社交媒体AI浏览器会如何颠覆广告的商业模式呢And how will AI browsers disrupt the current way of advertisers因为 search engines like browsers are the main traffic entrance for a lot like SEO rankings display ads, right? So how will this new AI browser thing disrupt the money-making machine for Google and Meta? I think you're asking the right question, but it's a narrow question. I would encourage you
[24:59] Take a step back and ask a bigger question. What is search in this brave new world that we are going in, right? So historically, all of us used search as a discovery mechanism for us as a human. You want to travel somewhere, say, Hawaii, great hotels, and then you would search. And you have to ask yourself five years from now or some long arc of time, five years from 10 years from, are you really doing that? Because are you really going to this bar and typing in Hawaii, great hotels to see 10 blue links and one by one clicking through those and figuring out who else is reviewing this and is that really going to be the system of engagement i can tell you my bet is zero chance zero chance five or ten years from now you're going to the small bar whether from google or bing or some other search engine i think that entire world gets completely disrupted completely changed because what you will do is to a trusted agent or a browser that you trust and say i'm thinking of going to Hawaii, what do you think? It's like, well, here's some options. The search will happen, but it's getting pushed one layer down and is getting done by AI. And so I call this the- You talk to your travel agent which is the browser That right About hey here my plan You figure out maybe you need to do search Maybe you need to talk to cloud or open AI whatever That your job My job is to talk to my travel agent. That's right. Now, think about the repercussions of that. The entire search industry today, entire search industry is based on a very simple assumption that there's a somewhat impatient human who doesn't have perfect querying abilities sitting there and wants an answer right away, right? And that's why every ask, think, why do they only show 10 search links? That's because if you showed 40, I would be overwhelmed. If you showed only three, I won't quite trust you. So, you know, somehow with enough experimentation, you decided 10 seems like the right number. And so the entire industry is focused on this act of me going to this one bar, you know, typing in an imperfect search query, and then going through results one by one. That AI agent, that is not how. So for instance, one of our companies, XAI, is building a search engine specifically for AI agents because AI agents, the way they search, the things they search for, and the kind of queries they can ingest back is vastly different from human. Human today does this. Great hotels in Hawaii 10 links show up I click on each one of those Here what I do by the way I open each tab Now I got 11 tabs in my browser Then I go one by one each tab I don like any of these Then I go next page and I click through the room and oh my God it takes hours What a frustrating thing. You know what an AI does? It doesn't care for 10 tabs. It's not going to open 10 tabs and then go browse those hotels. It makes one query. Give me 100 hotels and give me all the metadata associated with it and give me all the reviews all in one shot. One shot comes back, jam into the context window, ask four people, based on what you know about Guru, what are hotels you think I might like on these days? And by the way, don't even suggest something that's not available on those dates. And it shows me three things. I was like, you know what? I feel like going to this one right now. So the entire notion of how search happens, changes, and that is the bigger threat to search. The threat to search is not just the browser moving from Chrome to Neo. The bigger threat to search is the fact that it's not a human searching anymore. I just don't believe that human-initiated search queries will be the dominant search 10 years from now. It is just not the case. It is AI that is doing that search and discovery. And so we are investing in teams that are making that world a reality And so the browser becomes more of an interaction mechanism through which you driving automation you having conversations you doing things that matter to you as a system of engagement for entertainment at work. Search as a function gets delegated to AI that does it, fetches the right piece of information for you in that moment. I very much agree, right? Before you talk about monetization and business model, we first need to talk about what the future looks like right you know you just laid out the future chrome to neo browser right that's just one part of the future but also how the search is being done which layer you know in the tech stack i totally agree with you you know but just one additional color to share about this business model right i want to say we don't know what the business model is in the sense that if you think about search why google even you know why we even have a google that's because Because Google, when Larry Page actually, I heard this on quite a podcast, there was a fascinating story. It was 1997 before Google started. Larry Page went to this company called Excite. It was one of the double digit number of search companies. Excite was doing pretty well.
[29:59] tested, right, you know, my search and then Google search. And their team is like, you know, felt strongly Google search is far better, far better. So the CEO, you know, in the last meeting, CEO went to the room and said, hey, you know, let me figure out, you know, should I, you know, acquire the technology or whatever, you know, we wanted to do, right. The moment he saw like a Google search was far better and then people will, you know, the first link is so relevant. he basically said get out of the room why is that because of the business model because the excited business model is about banner ads so the longer people stay on that page the better so if the first blue link is actually the relevant one my banner ads revenue is going to be shrinking not increasing so so to me like for us to thinking about okay ads revenue this and we're going through another major shift. So I want to say whoever thinking about ads revenue, the way it's being sort of done today, which is enormous, is wrong. Now, the only guy who couldn't say that is Google, right He cannot say Google cannot say well I cannot I mean they have to right They have to report to the go to the Wall Street every quarter right billion I mean most of that is ads so i want to say google is screwed for that reason now of course google has a gem net model has a you know a lot of other things right they may have a spin up new project so i think the future is unclear from that point of view but i want to say to answer your question one is what i totally agree with what guru says you know think about what the future looks like I think it's a different future. And secondly, what's the business model for that new future rather than what's the business model in the current way of thinking of the ads? There's a way to think about this. When you look at a particular market, are the products serving the business model or is the business model serving the product? In the early days of development of a market, you come up with a great product. and then you attach a business model to it to serve the product because you want to build more product you want more people to use it this is the early days of google and then you get to a point at some point after tremendous success you're stuck in that business model and the product serves the business model this is when you go from google search engine tremendously successful is now stuck with this business model so instead of three or four banners on the right side you start showing those results at the top of the search results And then slowly you start making them look more and more and more like an actual search result. How many times do you do a search query nowadays on Google and you're like, is this a sponsored result or a real result? Like, I have to pay attention to that little italics at the bottom, sponsored. I was like, nope, scrolling right past. But I doubt everyone is that careful because they make it look like a Now you have a situation where the product is serving the business model. That's where the opportunity is. And that's why venture capital exists. Those founders that we are funding, they don't care for the business model. They want to build the absolute best product. We've both been founders. We didn't start our companies going, man, what's a business model I would do? No, we saw an opening in the market to create an amazing product. And then we bolted on a business model to that, to serve that product in the right way. And I think that's the opportunity. The market is a natural way of the world. I don't blame Google or anyone else for that. But it's their success that lands them in that place. And it is that the fact that you're stuck to your business model and the product is merely serving the business model now and not trying to be the best product it can be, that is the opportunity for founders. And we pretty excited about that Yeah that great timing As you said I often click the first or second one in the Google page and then turn out to be something totally different You know, sometimes they joke about this. Even the competitor company will show up because of the ranking. There are times on my mobile, I can't even use Google anymore. If I use it, I have to go through one screen and then a second screen. Now I'm past the sponsored results to get to the actual search query. Why would I use that? But I can just fire up Claude and say, here's my query, give me the answer. That's because they have a product serving the business model. That's the reason. That's exactly right. That's an easy explanation. That's why we need AI agent to be a real product. We need AI agent to quickly improve. We've also had a podcast about AI agent's different challenges and challenges. including the data collection, the speed of MCP, etc. Our guest Haoui said that he thinks that AI-file technology will have three stages of development. What are some technology breakthroughs or advancements we need in order to overcome the current barrier? Since I have been living and breathing in the browser revolution in the last one year, this is a tough one.
[34:59] big dear to my heart, 24 by 7, right? So I think for the AI native browser, we are going through three different phases at this point. You know, the first phase is pretty much chat and then search, right? The merge or like, why do I need a chat? And when do I need a chat? When do I need a search? It doesn't make any sense for people to say, oh, go to Google for search. And then this question, I mean, you need to give me a unified experience so that I have questions, I have something, go one place. You know, that place will give me chat if needed, give me search if needed, right? Give me the direct navigation. If I want to go to my Bank of America account, I don't want to go to 10 Blue Links. I want to go to Bank of America, right? So the navigation, chat, search, that uniform experience needs to be there. You know, I think for the AI native browser, like, you know, Norton Neo, right? We already have gone to that phase. And I think many other browsers either realize that or about to get there, right? You know, the search and the chat merge. So I would say this is a kind of a phase one. The phase two and the phase three, the timing is a little bit controversial. I'll give you my point of view, but I think the industry has a different point of view. The phase two in my opinion is the browser Now that a search and the chat needs to be merged the browser needs to be a lot more proactive a lot more personalized It cannot be just I want to go to CNN or Fox News and then give me the link. Before I go there, there is something that's being done, maybe notification. Maybe I'm reading this part of the news and of course I didn't pay attention to all the details. and then two days later it will say, hey, you know, Howie, you are interested in F1, right? By the way, there's an event, you know, of F1 that of the page you actually browsed either right now or just two days ago and then do you want to be kind of notified of such things, right? So there is a Superman sitting next to you almost, right? You know, browsing together with you and then it will help you to memorize things, it will help you to grab things, it will help you to go to 50 different websites if needed and summarize if needed, right? So I call it some personalized, proactive agent sitting next to you, or Superman sitting next to you doing that. So that's kind of what Neo Browser is working on, delivering the value. The phase three is agentic. But agentic is you can do a lot more complex things right You know for instance I want it not just some simple phone filling you know I wanted to achieve some complex things right The Agenic browser is like my assistant right You know, I wanted to go to Hawaii. It will figure out, you know, not just, you know, the top places I wanted to go to, but give me, you know, very detailed potential booking of this, you know, a lot of more things, right? I view that, you know, the merge of the chat and the search as a phase one, phase two is the personalized, the proactive browser, and then phase three is agentic. I think in the industry, there are people who actually believe we need to jump to the agentic browser right away. I don't disagree. I mean, in fact, we do phase two and phase three at the same time. I don't believe the technology is quite ready for full-blown agentic browser, right? For instance, you know, if I want to buy an iPhone cover on Amazon, right, I wouldn't trust the agentic browser to do that yet because it may work eight out of 10 times or nine out of the 10 times, but what if the one out of the 10 times and it doesn't give me an iPhone cover, it gives me an iPhone, right? That's not what I want, right? So I wouldn't trust the AI nearly as much yet. So but if we are able to get to that phase three that not just a search navigation chat merge but also search chat and the action merge I feel like the technology is not quite here in terms of the action Simple action, sure. That's what we are trying to do as well. So we are going through for the Neo browser. We already finished the phase one. We feel like we are leading the rest of the pack. we're leading the recipe pack in terms of the you know moving forward on the personalized browser and then the proactive browser and then you know guru is going to try out and say wow i didn't realize it can be this personalized and i'm going to coach you um once you say that but on the you know in all seriousness right you know there's a lot of things to be done by the way it's not like you know just you know integrating whether anthropic and open ai it's done that you have to think much harder in terms of what's the user experience, right? Because at the end of the day, you know, I might be proactive, but it could be very annoying, right? You know, so how to balance the user experience, it's a very tough problem. So we are going through that phase two. Agentic stuff, you know, we are also delivering some agentic stuff, but I view that as a, you know, potentially a year, maybe 18 months, maybe longer, right? You know, we are going to gradually making some progress. That's sort of how I see, you know,
[39:59] the technology on the browser side. Yeah, I like this framing. I like this framing of phase by phase of, you know, starting in a way that consumers can very easily sort of adapt to the new model, then the depersonalization, then the action and orientation. It's almost in the way you were describing, Tavi, somebody struck me like this might be the time that the browser actually becomes sort of the AI operating system. That might be the larger opportunity in the fullness of time, that the browser is no longer sort of this little window through which we, you know, access information and take actions on the internet or applications, but truly an operating system for our lives where it is agentic, it is proactive, and of course, it is a true partner in terms of combining chat and search and sort of brainstorming with it. And I think that's a world I'm excited in. I would take the other side of that agentic bet. I think some of the stuff that Anthravic and others are working on is just so remarkable. I think we're all going to be by how quickly automation comes into our lives. And that's exciting. Cool. I'm a big fan of agentic stuff. I'm not saying that when I say a year, 18 months from now, I mean the high accuracy, right? The agentic sort of the outcome you know but otherwise agentic is here and now So you know I fascinated about what do you think about voice Howie does it have a renewed place here I mean it gotten so good Like sometimes I'm not even typing. I'm just sort of talking. Yeah, that's very interesting. So when we started working on you and the first version we shipped, you know, the alpha version, you know, last, you know, about December, we already had a voice. in it. I want to say it's interesting. There's not as much adoption of the voice initially, but it's unclear because a voice is the wrong feature or human just need to adapt to it, right? Because, you know, for mobile, I think people are more used to doing the voice. For the desktop, right? I don't think people are kind of, okay, I'm talking to a laptop. It's less kind of a natural, but who knows, right? You know, it may be a matter of time or maybe, you know, I think there are two different things here. One is, is the voice technology mature enough, natural, cheap enough, low latency enough? I want to say we have as an industry, right, has made a tremendous impact, tremendous improvement in the last 12 months So I want to say the excuse is no longer the technology readiness So that number one the technology readiness And the second thing is you know is the technology suitable for that use case scenario right I would say we haven't seen that yet. I was a big fan of the adopting voice into the browser, you know, working with my team, we got this feature in. But, you know, I was also told that no one used that feature. um so i think your instinct is right by the way that there is like voice is so uh finicky you know 95 accuracy is not enough like it has to deeply understand what i'm saying with my accent with the kind of words i use if i'm a specialist in some domain in finance or i'm a doctor it needs to understand those terms uh it needs to be real time i need to be able to see very quickly what it's typing so there is a very high bar my instinct is we're very close we're very close um there's also a very high bar for the user experience because if i'm talking i'm talking if it waits for all of that to finish and then show me the text that's not going to work i i need to see it getting typed up right away to get confidence that it's doing what so i think the technical bar is very high but we almost there it feels almost there almost there and then you should write on the other side too is it suitable for that use case And I think there will be a few set of use cases where it will become habit forming very quickly very quickly That's my instinct. But we'll say, I'd be curious if you turn that back on and invest more in it, how that goes. Maybe that's a follow-on conversation. And then you are going to be the user of our voice. 100%. Okay, 100%. I get it. The first better user for sure. And how about visual? I think visual probably is the next stage for browsers because visual has tons of other information that probably voice or language couldn't describe. But we're still probably a little bit too early nowadays as we're waiting for the AI hardware. I think I'm very excited about new visual interaction models that AI enables. I do think it's a bit early right now, but the technology is getting there. To give you an example, today the entire browser engagement model is I go to a website and a pre-laid out website with its images and text and everything shows up. Maybe there's an opportunity based on what AI knows my intent is.
[44:59] that entire output, could be a video, could be an image, could be text, everything is generated just for me in that moment. And visuals are a huge part of that, including how it's presented, right? Maybe it's a mind map of some sort, because that's what I like. Maybe it's mostly images, because AI has learned that for me, I'm a visual thinker, and I like to see images. Maybe it's mostly text, because AI has learned that I don't like images, I actually like to read through stuff as quickly as possible. So I do think the ability to generate images and videos is tremendously exciting, but it is right now expensive, unpredictable. The same prompt will get you two very different images every time and fairly high latency. I know teams that are working on all three of those, making it more predictable, making it very low latency to real-time video generation. We are beginning to see some demos, especially in gaming of infinite games, right? As you're playing, it's generating the world. It just never finishes. So it is generating the world in real time faster than wall clock time. And so you never see the end of that video So we beginning to see that There six settings a bit low resolution right now but it beginning to get there And then the cost has to drop I think as that happens I excited It not a six thing it feels like but it is there out there So this time, Guru talking about the engineering side of things, right? The cost, latency, the technology maturity part. I'm going to talk about the vision side. This is where I see that 10 years from now, maybe less than 10 years. not two years, but some years from now, when we look back, the way we use browser is totally unbelievably wrong. Why do I say that? Today, you go to whether, again, Fox News or CNN, whatever your favorite news website is, you go there, you see the text, you see the video that they give to you. But guess what? Why do I consume text just because CNN, Fox News give to me? right? It should be me, right? I need a video when I want to watch video. I need the text when I want to, you know, read the text. The source of the data is, I want to say irrelevant, is not, shouldn't be static, right? So we do need to see the browser that's multi-modality, meaning that it's a layer in between right I have a need Okay I going to watch news I going to watch video right Then you know whether the CNN Fox News everything it doesn matter If it a text it will be converted into video for me But at some time right you know I driving you know and on the passenger side of the seat, and then I just want to scroll some, even if I go to YouTube, right, you know, I just want to see the summary of the text rather than, you know, video, right? Because it's the wrong environment for me to do it, things like that. So I want to say multimodality is a different way. You know, it's going to allow us to unlock the value of me as a consumer consuming information in the more appropriate, in the more efficient way. Instead of me being locked into CNN, give me this piece of things in text, give me this in audio. I have to stuck with that. I don't have to be stuck with it. You know what's the most exciting demo I've seen there? I'm sure you've played on with this product, too. It's a product called Notebook LM from Google. Well, it was so amazing, right? We all read papers or blogs or press releases. You take that same paper, you feed it to Notebook LM while you're driving. It appears at a podcast. Really well done product. Really well done product. Now imagine a next iteration of that where it discovers, you know what, Guru instead of a podcast prefers to watch a YouTube video of this thing as a talking head Now you got two avatars in a freshly created video just for you that are discussing that technical paper and going with each other I mean we going into a brave new world that going to be really exciting The mode or the modality in which you consume information will be decided in a personalized way in real time. If in this moment I want to consume that information as text, it'll appear as text. As a podcast or audio, it'll appear as podcast or audio. If a video, it'll appear as a video. That's the world we're headed in. That's pretty exciting. I think a lot of opportunities, especially in consumer land, related to that. So the browser war is real. It is real. I know the AI browsers offer convenience and a whole new future, as we talked about. but they could also centralize user data collection in ways that could raise privacy concerns for sure. So how risky is that from both governance as well as the trust perspective? Maybe how you go first? Yeah, I can go first because this is a topic that I kind of see both sides of the coin, right? On the one hand, a lot of times people want a convenience, you know, just to ship anything and everything.
[49:59] into your, you know, whether the model provider or whoever, as long as I get the best answer, right? But then there are people who care about, oh, do I give sensitive information? Do you retain my prompts, right? Because my prompt is, you know, for some people, they don't want, you know, other people to see about it, right? So to me, you know, it's very important for the consumers to have the choice. So the analogy I would use is if you think about Messenger, right, you know, there are Messenger do end-to-end encryption, and then the extreme version of that is probably signal. People have the peace of mind. Whatever I do with signal, I get to see it. You get to see it if I do it. No one in the middle. That's great. And then there are other messengers. There are always visibility by people in the middle, so there's a wider spectrum. Our design, I'm not saying that everyone needs that, but at least from a new point of view, not a new point of view. We wanted to give a browser that's almost like a signal of the browser. So that you have the confidence that as long as that's your choice, that's your configuration, that's your setting, the prompt saves on your local device only. It doesn save on my server or whoever server One may cloud days isn that shouldn be a big deal anymore But guess what Certain people really care about it Right So I want to say for people care about privacy, for people care about security. That's why, you know, a lot of people came to Norton Neo because of that reason, because Norton carries the security sort of peace of mind for them and also our design. But I would also say that I'm pretty sure there are people who would tell me that I don't care about any of that. All I care is doing some fancy, agentic workflow as long as I get that thing done. Sure, there will be those kind of the scenarios too. What do you think? There's a few words that are all interrelated here, a few concepts. Security. Privacy. Trust. Because privacy and trust. if i trust you i don't need to be very private if i don't trust you i need to be very private so and then finally alignment are we aligned in our worldview when i say something share something with you you treat it with this the same way i would treat it you know it's a treat others like you would treat yourself kind of so is there alignment is there trust is there security and then is there privacy because privacy in of itself doesn mean anything Obviously you share everything with your spouse but you don share much with a stranger That's all related to trust. And so when we think about these four things, our core belief is every layer in the technology stack needs to think of these primitives and give the user as much control, give the upper layer as much control as possible. Howie's team is doing this with the end user. So when we use it, we can decide how much do we want to trust, how much privacy we need to dive. I think most consumer applications will have to offer that choice because this technology, unlike preceding technologies, is extremely powerful but needs access to your life and your information to be even more powerful. So the delta between not giving it any information and giving it information, its effectiveness is very, is actually quite different. And so I think the temptation for giving it more information is going to be very high. And so I think it would be very difficult for application providers, browser builders to de facto assume where to set that dial. I think what is more important is to recommend certain settings and give that dial I give you another example Deeper in that layer there probably an integration with Anthropic that Neo has And so we're, again, we love Anthropic's vision here because, again, that focus on trust, safety, security, alignment is extraordinarily important. Because as an application builder, you can provide all those controls. But at the end, if the intelligence doesn't really respect those directives, then you've got a bigger problem on your hands. So along this line, do you see that in the future, the consumers will, you know, own some, I don't know, the digital vault. And I say, hey, this part I give to a browser. This part I give to that AI agent because I'm going to have six agents or 60 agents I'm dealing with anyways. You know, I'm going to, you know, sort of keep the memory, the data in one place. I can centrally manage and then depending on which agent. Did you see that or how do you think about it? I'm curious because you see so many different applications. That's why I'm asking this question. I think there's a few cybersecurity nerds like Howie and I, who are extremely careful with managing information and which applications get what application. But my observation is the average consumer, the cognitive burden of parceling information into these sand
[54:59] and then giving individual sandboxes to individual applications, the cognitive burden is too much for the average consumer. I can tell you, people outside Silicon Valley or people outside the cyber ecosystem, you know, when you log into something with Google and then Google says, this thing will have access to these seven Google services. Are you OK with it? The number of people who read that and take action on that is zero. People are just like, yes, I just want to use this application. So the answer is, for a small subset of people, yes, this ability to enclave information will be important. And a lot of those use cases will be economically valuable, because if you're working at the NSA, obviously, it's very valuable. So you might be able to build a business around it. But I do not see a world in which individual consumers, uninformed, masses, billions of customers out there will be able to parcel this information in the right way. We can barely do that in our personal lives. Like, it's just so difficult to remember. what did I tell my spouse and what did I tell my kid and what did I tell my cousin? Like it's just hard, you know, the cognitive burden is too much. Now, if AI can help us with that, that could be interesting. I think consumers, you know, when it comes to privacy security stuff, the consumers do not like the cognitive friction right And also they do not like pay for it When it free and the frictionless they will say privacy But as long as one of the two things or maybe both they say well, I don't know. One of the privacy focused search engines would have been the dominant search engine on the planet and not Google if consumers really truly walk the walk. People like to talk about privacy, but at the end of the day, they want to just do what they want to do. It needs to be frictionless. They don't want to pay for it if it's free. If you can incorporate privacy into it, great. If you can't, most consumers in my experience don't care. They don't care. Hey, another question. So consumers do not want to pay for anything in the past, right? Gmail or anything, right? But now they pay $20 a month for, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI. Do you see that kind of the, you know, the behavior? It's a shift of behavior. What do you see? I think that actually going back to a previous discussion, I think the business long term business models are still to be discovered here. I think the initial paying 20 bucks a month, five bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, depending on the utility you get, it makes a lot of sense. I think it provides very high signal back to these companies. It also pays for the very high cost of inference in some cases and the thing I love about that is historically even we technically relatively forward people we didn spend 20 bucks a month on five six, seven different applications. Now we do. And the thing I love about that is that's the value we're getting out of AI is so high that we finally got broke out of that habit and started paying. Imagine, like in 20 years. Yeah. 40 years. What did you pay for? I didn't pay for anything. Never paid for anything. And then starting a year or two ago, we were like, oh my God, like I can't live without this stuff. Swipe a credit card and go for it. So that's amazing. Long-term, is that the business model? Unclear. I think we'll have a mixture of everything. The winning business model is still to be discovered. Could be, hey, we provide you the most secure and private browser. Could be, and so you should pay for it. Could be ads, could be something else. So that's, I think, unclear. I do have one last question. So what are the most exciting startup opportunities you see for the next five to 10 years as we watch this AI browser war starts? So obviously it goes without saying that AI is so foundational and such an amazing building block that nearly every part of the technology market and beyond will present great opportunities So I won rule out anything Having said that some of the most interesting opportunities and a great test for founders is, could this be built three years ago? It's a very simple question, but are you doing something that could have been done three years ago? You're just doing it slightly better. Or are you doing something that three years ago was just economically or from a technical reason just not possible three years ago could you build technology or four years ago could you build technology that could go through all the pdfs that a company publishes in their financial disclosures and give you a summary of those practically impossible today super easy build against that so that's a I'm pretty excited by businesses that three or four years ago were simply not feasible, either economically or technically. It's a very clear why now. So I enjoy that, but I'm curious how you view that. Well, going back to one of the points you made earlier, right? Browser is not just a browser. It's going to be the AI operating system, right? So from my point of view, I have bias, but NIO is going to take over Chrome completely.
[59:59] this is the future of the operating system. I'm going to work with 60 million applications working with my browser. So there are tons of startup opportunity hosting on Neo. That's what I see for the next 10 years. Actually, that's a great point. You are pushing the frontiers of what a browser can be. And those frontiers then enable a new class of applications on top in the same way that the incorporation of JavaScript inside a browser led to Ajax, Gmail, and all kinds of fun stuff that was built on top. Actually, I wasn't thinking about that, but this is a great point. The innovations at the browser level in of themselves might offer a new class of applications to emerge. Yeah, and all the agents working with my browser is the lead generation for Lightspeed. There you go. So 50% of the leads will be hosted on my browser anyways. I'm definitely subscribing and paying for this browser. Okay, here you go. Sounds exciting. Wow. All right, gentlemen, that's all my questions. Do you have anything else to add? I still have the question about why we don't hear about from Anthropic. I only wish the Indians were any less tighter. All I can tell you is it is an incredible company, and I wish I could share more. I have never worked with a sharper more thoughtful bunch of people It just an incredible team And as you and I we had long careers At this point in our careers it about working with incredible people who push our own point of view of the world, our own thinking. And I couldn't be more privileged to work with that team. So stay tuned, is all I would say. Anyway, this was great, Howie. I'm really glad you suggested and thank you for moderating. This is amazing. of the安全 problems, and we hope that you understand the future of AI. We hope that we will be able to help you with the future. We hope that we will be able to change the future of the world. Well, this is the video of all of our videos. Please like and comment on our channel. Please support our Quayquo101 and our channel for the best-to-day content. We'll see you next week. Bye!