Are AI Browsers the Future with Josh Miller

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:29Speaker 01

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• 1:13Speaker 01

  Learn more at jira.com. That's J-I-R-A dot com. Yeah, what is up, people of the internet? Welcome to a bonus episode of the Waveform Podcast. This is a fun one. A lot of you have been expecting this one because we shouted it out in our last Friday episode where we talked briefly with Josh Miller, the CEO of the browser company. This is the full, unedited, hour-long interview, which has a lot of interesting perspectives in it. It was good for all of us to get to sit down and talk to him about browsers, about Arc, about Dia, and to actually get concrete answers on some things we were wondering about. What if Google tries to do exactly what you're doing? How will you get people who love Arc to switch to Dia and vice versa? And could features bounce back and forth between them? A lot of interesting stuff, so I'll just get right into it.

• 1:57Speaker 01

  This is a full conversation with Josh.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  First of all, let's introduce you because you're the CEO of The Browser Company. And The Browser Company is a pretty self-explanatory name. But break down what you do, what the company does, and then we can chat about all this stuff.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Sure. Thank you so much for having me. When we started The Browser Company, people warned me that nobody cares about web browsers. So didn't think this is why I would be here, but it's awesome to have made it on Wayform making web browsers. So thank you for having me. We make two browsers. We make a browser called Arc, which is awesome to see on both of your screens.

• 2:33Speaker 01

  You probably noticed it.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  I appreciate it. And then a new AI browser called Dia, which I'm excited to talk about today.

• 2:38Speaker 01

  Is that a reference to Dia Beacon, by the way?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Naming's hard. So for one of the people, Dia Beacon had a connection to it.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  Dia Beacon is an, it's an art museum in Beacon, New York. Yeah. I think I remember saying a while ago, Arc is a good name, too.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  I do remember that. I definitely remember that.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  It's a good name.

• 2:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. And also Dia is kind of like a new day, a new dawn. But if there's one thing that is hard at startups, naming anything and creating a logo for anything is a religious debate.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  Totally fair.

• 3:09Speaker 02

  We got here.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So, I mean, as we've talked about on this podcast, there's been like a lot of chatter in the browser world. You know, obviously, we're a more niche group of people really into tech, but it just feels like there's movement with browsers and with people trying new things and new concepts and new ideas of what the internet is and what search is. And it's all very interesting. And so I figured it would be cool to have you talk a little bit about, number one, how we got to Arc, and then, number two, how you moved from Arc to Dia being the second big focus and big project.

• 3:40Speaker 02

  Sure. Yeah. So our original observation that led to The Browser Company was that it was 2019, 2020. And I was actually working at a VC firm for two years. And I was noticing that all of the kind of hot new startups that were coming in, they were all web apps for the first time. You know, for the 10 years before that, everything I'd been working on were mobile apps. And now these companies are coming in and showing these wild new reinventions of documents. Exactly. And then what struck me was every time they came in, they were in this rectangle that was Chrome, and that thing hadn't changed at all in decades. But the thing that really got me excited about browsers was that observation. And then my wife got a job with a 76-year-old artist in Flagstaff, Arizona. The least tech-centric workplace you can imagine.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  And I saw her in her new job, she never left Chrome. Even in the art world, you know, she got sent PDFs from galleries and they were URLs that she opened in Chrome. She spent hours and hours every day in Chrome. And myself and my co-founder and the early employees were all consumer backgrounds. People that worked at Snapchat and Instagram were really interested in how software can touch people at scale. You know, all the people in our life. And we thought, wait a minute, browsers are one of the most consumer pieces of software imaginable. We don't, you don't think about it like that. Like the way you feel about Instagram or your iPhone. No one cares about Chrome or Safari in that way. And so that to us felt like, oh my God, this is this dry utility that hasn't changed in two decades. They use for hours every single day. And everyone's like, yeah, I don't really have an opinion about it.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  Like where else in tech do you have that? So that was really the simple idea was, okay, if our browsers are now really these effectively operating systems with our apps and files. And you don't care about it, but you're spending hours every day. What might it look like to build a piece of software that people cared so much about and made them feel good? Which kind of gets back to where I started is people warned they don't care. And I think part of the reason we're here today is now people care so much about Arc. I'm coming on the Wake One Podcast.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  So be careful what you wish for, I guess.

• 5:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we end up in a place where like we all are super heavy tech users. And a lot of us here, I think all of us actually still use Arc, like really love the browser and the product and the features and a lot of the UI. People can scroll back to previous episodes where we've talked about it. And so it's, it's developed a community where we, yes, people do care about this web browser.

• 5:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:58Speaker 01

  And now there is this new project you're working on, which is Dia, which is super early. We've all started playing with it and it's, it's very different. It's an, you've already said it's an AI-based web browser. Explain what Dia is, and then we can figure out like how it exists in the world of browsers.

• 6:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, actually, and before getting to Dia, I'm curious, I went back and re-watched the first time David brought up Arc on this podcast.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Nice. Which by the way is embarrassing because I had no idea how to explain it.

• 6:24Speaker 02

  Well.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  I was like, it removes my tabs when I don't use them.

• 6:27Andrew Manganelli?

  Arc got introduced to this whole company because David has a tab hoarding problem. And it had a feature to do that. And that was the feature that sold David off the bat.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  And that was only one of the features.

• 6:37Andrew Manganelli?

  But then it slowly grew to multiple people in the office and it's become like a favorite.

• 6:42Speaker 02

  But I remember being so excited to hear that David brought it up on this podcast and I remember watching the video and like David, I knew he knew about it and you really did stumble.

• 6:51David Imel?

  I just was like, well, it does this and the tabs are on the side. It's kind of, it's weird and it's interesting like hearing you talk about the way that people want to have like an emotional connection with their browser because again, even something as simple as having the tabs on the side of the browser, that's something that is very native to Arc that I think a lot of people are, and we'll get into this later, I think, but like are frustrated about with like DX, it's back to the Chrome experience. But yeah, it's just, there have been many things about Arc that have just like got their hooks into us here at the studio.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  And so the reason I bring it up though is because on that podcast, you were, I would say, open-minded, but very skeptical. And I'm curious for you what shifted because it relates to the Dia story that we'll get to in a second, I'm sure.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  I think it's one of those things where I didn't care too much about the browser either. I was using Chrome and then I was switching to Safari on the laptop because of the battery life was better and I was just kind of agnostic and was willing to try something. So I tried something. And I think it was a couple of features that I did like, especially for whatever reason, the side tabs, it's a widescreen machine, like it just made too much sense and I just got hooked. So Arc like quickly became my home and then the syncing across devices, I just like started using Arc a lot.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 8:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Awesome. Okay. So to answer your question about Dia and then I'm sure we can come back to that.

• 8:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  So there, my personal life and professional life, I keep very separate. You know, my personal life, it's people I went to college with, high school with, they're not in tech. They work in manufacturing or art. And I feel like in the past six months, nine months, all of them have started talking to these AI chat tools for everything in their life. You know, my friend who works in manufacturing that I was talking about, I was hanging out with him a couple of weekends ago and he was saying, there's not a professional project or personal chore that he does not turn to AI in some way to get help with. And the last time, there have been two times in my life that has happened where I woke up one day and all of my personal friends changed the way they interface with their computers. When I was in middle school and everyone got an AIM and MySpace and LiveJournal and Facebook.

• 8:52Speaker 02

  And then in college, starting with a BlackBerry and then the iPhone, when we started doing things like Instagram and then stories on Snapchat. This is that third time in my life. And I feel like because we're so in the tech world, talking about AI, and I actually think I did a poor job of leading us about a year ago because I felt uncomfortable about this.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  In our industry, AI is like a political topic. It's like politics where you have these two extreme parties and voices that dominate the conversation because they have the time to care about it. You have these AGI maximalists that are like, get ready for UBI. And then you have people that that actually as a reaction to this, and I was part of that at the beginning, are like, it's slop, it's garbage. It's dystopian, it's gonna write our emails to our loved ones, like how dumb it is. And I think when you get out of the building, which we've tried to do for the past year and a half, and talk to people that are not in tech. It's somewhere in the middle, but I would actually say slightly closer to the AGI side of it is rewiring how people interface with their computers.

• 9:48Speaker 02

  There was this University of Nebraska student I interviewed, and she was talking about, I turned to it, for meal planning and for help with outfits and friend advice in school. And so the foundational kind of observation of Dia was that, what is a browser? It is technically a user agent. Your browser is designed to represent you to webpages and web servers and bring stuff back on your behalf. And so it seems so clear outside of the tech world and ARC and all that stuff aside, that people wanted to interface with the internet. Not just with webpages anymore, but with AI models and probably in the future agents like deep research. And shouldn't your interface to the internet be able to both handle webpages and chat and models and agents? And so that was the observation that made us so excited to work on Dia.

• 10:32Speaker 02

  We can obviously talk about ARC as well and the challenges we had there, but that really was the the inciting observation that led us to say, wait a minute. If we're really building a browser, a user agent for the next five, 10 years, which we have to think about. The world is so clearly going there, whether or not the AGI versus AI slop debate gets talked about the most.

• 10:50David Imel?

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

• 11:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I want to touch on the Thursday updates and the feelings, because it's really important, you all were actually influential here. What people miss was the first year of Arc. The first year of Arc did not have a lot of the stuff that people love. And the way that we got to that place was by testing it early with people who are like, nah, I don't like it. Here's what I don't like about it. And this is missing the soul. Like, where is that feeling? Where are the craft details? Where is the browser company's spirit? And then us integrating it? You better believe that's in the version of DIA when we launched. We just like testing early and often. Now, the question of why not integrate into Arc? Boy, did we try. Like, a year of my life trying to figure out how we could take where we thought the world was going and put it in Arc. There are two problems. I wish there were three, because of rule of three, but there were two.

• 12:07Speaker 02

  The first is, there's this novelty tax that you get when you try new product. Not you guys, but the average person that has a job and they have stuff going on in their life, and someone's like, hey, you should try this new thing, Arc. They have like 30 seconds that they're willing to give to it. And as David talked about stumbling over his original pitch, they're like, okay, so the tabs are over here, and there are these things called spaces, and then there are pin tabs, but the pin tabs are different, the bookmarks in these ways, you gotta try split screen. And it's just like, the people just couldn't handle how much there was to learn that was new. And so we just felt, if the world is gonna as profoundly shift as we think it is because of these AI models, how are we going to teach you how to interface with AI models and agents,

• 12:49Speaker 02

  whatever the heck comes, while also teaching you about all of those novel concepts?

• 12:53David Imel?

  It's a lot.

• 12:53Speaker 02

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

• 13:07David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  So that was problem number one. Problem number two is, it touches me and our team that people love Arc so much. It also had performance issues. I think it had way too many features. We built it in a very prototype experimental way. And what we learned over time is the importance of speed and the importance of reliability and just your browser feeling snappy. And there were architectural decisions we made in Arc and then layered and layered and layered over time that even if we thought we could solve the novelty problems, it would have been really challenging to hit our bar for speed and performance and other things that were important to us.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  I don't quite know how to verbalize this. And if you all think about this with your video creations, but it also felt like Arc was not finished, not perfect, but it had the right components. It was what it was meant to be. It didn't feel like it was missing things. And if you go back to our YouTube comments, maybe a year ago or so, every time we would push a new feature, people would say, I don't want a new feature. I want like Android support. And I don't want a new feature. I want this to be faster. And so I feel like we also don't talk enough in the software world about like when a product is not done, but in the state it is meant to be, and it is what it is. And you can do with it what you want. And to me, again, people that used Arc, I'm sure you didn't have that many complaints

• 14:24Speaker 02

  with the tab model or the craft details. It sort of felt like the product was what it was meant to be. And there was something to just like come to terms with, you know?

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, no, I think that was one of my questions was essentially, is Arc a finished product? Because it is so different and it is so built and it has these new fundamentals. And now it kind of does this new thing. And obviously, there's optimizations and speed improvements and little things here and there. But essentially, as an idea, is it done?

• 14:50Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  I feel like it kind of is. At least that was my take, which is why, you know, I think people who use Arc are kind of just asking for the little things now instead of just like massive new ideas. But yeah, go ahead.

• 15:02Speaker 02

  And the analogy that we use internally is, or one of them is, you know, Frank Ocean's Channel Orange, there was a mixtape that put him on the scene before that. And that only appealed to a certain type of audience. It was a great mixtape, but Channel Or- but it was done. It was a finished work of art. It was a complete thought. And Channel Orange was a how do we make something? I'm not sure this that we thought about it, but like, you know what I mean?

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  It's finished.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's very, it's funny, because in the, in the video world where we make a video, we, we kind of, we can edit the video forever. Like, I can edit one video for a year and it could never be done. But at a certain point, I have to get to 97% and go. Onto the next one. And so the video gets published and it's done and I can never finish it. In the software world, people have this expectation of updates forever. Like you buy a new phone and you're like, I want to get software updates for as long as possible. If I download and install a browser, I want new features and new updates for forever. So the expectation is different. But yeah, I feel like it's maybe a little bit more of a statement of the idea being so different that it can finish and be sort of published. And that's different in a software world.

• 16:11Speaker 02

  And honestly, I think it's, I'm surprised we don't talk about software more as a cultural product, like a video or a piece of art in that way. And that I looked at my iPhone screen, for example, and many of the apps that I still love and I've used for decades, Instapaper, I, Writer, even Apple Notes, they're pretty much the same product and I'm happy with it. Like one of the things that I will reflect on in a decade is, you know, we started putting out these videos very early on when other tech companies didn't do that, really not with a plan, just to sort of be ourselves and be open and invite the community in and just, I don't know, as an experiment. And a consequence, I think of our kind of experimental prototype driven culture where every week there is new stuff. And our experiment of being like, let's just be open about what we're doing, meant that we set this expectation

• 16:54Speaker 02

  that like every week, there's going to be some new hotness and new features and that we thrived on that for so long. Think about Safari. Is Safari a finished product? How long is it? It updates once a year.

• 17:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:06Speaker 02

  No one complains about that. How, you know, if you, whoever you over there use Chrome, how often are you like, man, this new Chrome feature is dope. So I'm, that's, I don't know what to do with that. Again, it's a byproduct of the way we, I have run this company, but I think there's also this interesting bar where no one's complaining that Safari hasn't gotten like wild new features in a long time. So

• 17:25Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 17:25Speaker 02

  I have done a horrible job in many ways, I think, communicating about what the heck is going on at the browser company. So I will own that. But Arc's not going anywhere. Arc is not going anywhere. Arc is not going anywhere. We're just focused on Dia in terms of where most of our energy is. And then yeah, let's do Chromium upgrades. Let's do security patches. Let's do bug fixes. Let's do the same things that these other browsers do.

• 17:46David Imel?

  Okay. How much of your company would you say that you have devoted to making sure that ARC is stable?

• 17:52Speaker 02

  There are probably three engineers at any given time working on one of those topics.

• 17:56David Imel?

  Okay.

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, but we're but just to be really clear, I don't want to over. We are not building new features as of now for ARC. So but that is very different than like this product is being sunsetted or going anywhere, anything like that.

• 18:09Andrew Manganelli?

  When you see your two company or two browsers together, do you expect people to move from ARC to DIA? Or do you kind of expect the ARC world to stay in ARC and DIA is a new subset of people coming to it?

• 18:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think we're in a little bit uncharted territory for a software company of our stage and that, you know, we called it the browser company for a reason. We could have changed the name to ARC many times. And so we've always been excited about having a portfolio of products and of browsers. Having said that, I do think a lot of the things people love about ARC will come to DIA in some form. And so the honest answer is like, I don't know, because one of the things that's been perplexing about ARC is we tried to get to the root of what was powerful about ARC for people. And it turned out there were like seven different archetypes that used like rant. There was the archetype that used the browser in zero Chrome like David is here and kind of flew around with keyboard shortcuts. And you had like the space organizer with pin tabs and folders renamed everything.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  And so in terms of are people going to go from ARC to DIA, we're not going to force anyone to do anything. I really like I'm I'm an Apple fanboy. I'm inspired by that. You got the like, the MacBook Pro or and then the MacBook Air and the iPod and it's different things for different people. But I suspect when we bring things over like a vertical sidebar, when we take a novel take on tab management, I think a lot of people, not to mention the browser company kind of design flair and craft, I suspect a lot of ARC people will prefer DIA. But I get excited about having having both for the foreseeable future.

• 19:37David Imel?

  So what's your plan to move those Chrome users over then? Right? Because if the whole if the whole idea is it's too complicated for most people? It's equally complicated to just get someone to move on to something else at all. Like, there's a lot of friction there. You're a small company. There's not a lot of brand recognition for my mom. You know, what's like, how, how are you planning on like finding those people who were never going to see the browser company at all? Because the whole point, right, is that you, is that ARC is sort of a limited user base because it's the power users.

• 20:07Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 20:07David Imel?

  If DIA is supposed to be, let's take all of Chrome's market share. How do you access those people at all?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, that is the big question. That has always been the question for this company from day one. So I don't want to purport to have like the definite answer. But the theory of DIA is, so if you go back to the idea of a browser as a user agent, and it's a user agent for webpages, and now it's going to be a user agent for models and chat. I think one of the things we concluded with ARC is that Chrome actually and Safari do great jobs with webpages. Obviously, there are things around tab management and alongsides, but like, I think for most people, they're fine with the way their user agent, their browser opens tabs. When you talk to those people I referenced, the, you know, the college friend and my wife about what, what is frustrating about these AI chat tools? We really hear two things.

• 20:54Speaker 02

  The first is it's a pain in the butt to get that context out of whatever app or file you're working in into the chat tool. So it has the awareness of what you're working on to do the damn thing. The second thing that frustrates them is it doesn't know anything about them. Even with memory, it knows the chats that you've had, but it doesn't really know what is your taste? What is your writing style? What are the things that you love? What are the things that you don't like? The browser, the traditional browser and traditional webpages solve both of those issues. Because as we started with, what are your tabs in 2025? Their apps and their files. So you don't have to copy and paste and futz around to get stuff out into chat. Let's just bring these AI models right to where you are in the apps and files that you use every day. And then the second bet is that.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  You know, you know how when you use Instagram reels or TikTok for better or worse, it feels like every swipe, every action like teaches the algorithm to better understand you?

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  The way that it should feel in the future is that in an AI browser like DIA, every tab that you open, it feels like this model, it's not Sam Altman's GPT-4O, it's like GPT David. And it's getting better and better and trained for you, every action that you take, so that when you ask a question about something else, it does not only has the context of that tab that you don't have to copy and paste into a tool. It also remembers the last seven shopping sessions that you did, or the last 17 things that you wrote. Like the way that I've been, I can't quite, this is the first external marketing thing I've done, so I don't actually have my language down yet. But there's something I've been thinking about that with Arc, the sort of hero image was the cluttered tab bar. Whenever we showed like seven windows with 50 tabs open, people are like, I hate that, I want whatever this is that fixes that.

• 22:32Speaker 02

  And that's so interesting because in the old world, that was a problem. That was clutter, that was chaos. In the world of AI models, that is like person, that's like oil. It is, it is the context that is missing to make these models actually understand you. And so the bet that you have to believe, which I know maybe not all of you do, is that truly AI is going to change how we interface with our computers and the things that you turn to it for. If you don't believe that, we're screwed. If you believe that future is going to be a reality, then I think the convenience of having it right there in your tools and files, combined with the compounding personalization that you get from that awareness.

• 23:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Is something that at least from talking to people outside the building, that's what, that's what is on their mind right now. They're not complaining about, you know, man, when I go to Google and I click this link, this sucks, give me a browser. That's not what's going on in the world anymore.

• 23:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, so I've used DIA for a little bit, and I, I think all these are really great features. Being able to refer to another tab I have open and get context and like, and totally have this be helpful alongside the web for me has been awesome. But the Chrome question still.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Which is, we were just talking about Chrome earlier in the office, which is Chrome is somehow, one of the, quietly, one of the most successful consumer products of all time. It somehow managed to be the default. Without having a mechanism to become the default. There is no like, I mean, there's Chrome.

• 23:54Speaker 02

  This is besides money.

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:56Speaker 02

  That's the mechanism.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  They found their way, but like when you get a new computer. People just put Chrome on it. That's like the default behavior. And so we watched Google I/O. We watched, you know, Google have all these plans to integrate Gemini and have a sort of co-pilot, if you will, alongside the web with you. And they talked at length about how they have all this context. We plug into your Gmail and your calendar. And we know of all your docs and all the things you've scheduled, and we can answer emails for you based on all this context. So in a world where people consciously seek out Chrome, and it's an incredibly powerful brand, how do you sort of kick down the door and introduce people to Dia? And maybe even have to differentiate Dia from Chrome, where they will probably be, you know, trying to do as many of these things as possible?

• 24:42David Imel?

  Yeah, especially because Chrome has this like crazy ability to already have all of your data. So when Gemini gets put in Chrome, all of a sudden it already has all the context where Dia, you have to teach it about yourself?

• 24:55Speaker 02

  The whole idea of where Dia is going very shortly is that you don't teach, you just browse.

• 25:01Speaker 01

  You just...

• 25:01Speaker 02

  So yes, if it's not your default browser, then we can't help you. But if you switch to it in earnest, just your normal browsing is going to personalize it. But I think the deeper question here is, okay, you're competing with Chrome, just 5 billion monthly active users. And, right, isn't that wild?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  That's insane.

• 25:17Speaker 02

  Because that is the thing that people have been sleeping on is if you're interested in consumer products, don't talk about Snapchat, talk about Chrome, right? So but really, the heart of your question is like, how the heck are you going to compete?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:29Speaker 02

  And I'll say, this has been the question since day one. Prior to Dia, you know, if I was doing an interview about Arc, it was like, man, why can't they just add split screen? If they just add a vertical sidebar, aren't they screwed? And so that doesn't mean it's not a, you know, a real threat. But what we've seen is they have a very powerful incentive, which is search and search ads. And so you know that Gemini button? We know from someone we interviewed that that thing was supposed to be the default in a much more bold way, but it tanks search ad revenue. Like, one of the things in Dia that people love the most is we train this on-device ML model that lives in your URL bar to make it really AI-native, that when you type a query, it parses that query to understand what is it that you're asking for?

• 26:11Speaker 02

  And it will send you to Google a lot, but if we think it's better to send it to AI chat or any number of AI agents or apps in the future, we just route you there. This really powerful thing where you don't have to learn modifier keys, talk about the noveltic tax. You don't have to learn any new features. We just infer your intent and send you to the right place. Could Google do that? Yeah. Could they do it better than us? Almost definitely. You know what? That will tank dramatically overnight. Like, the whole premise of an AI browser is search engines are not as important as they used to be. You should probably pretty rarely go to them now. So will Google and Chrome get to the motivation where they want to do that? I'm sure at some point, on the top three things that keep me up at night in my next 12 months running this company, that is not one of them.

• 26:55Speaker 02

  I think you see in the announcement, the Gemini. I got, honestly, I saw the videos like, oh, no. Right? Okay, so it's a button that you have to go pay for Gemini. Go pay for it, by the way. So there goes your default there. Who's going to pay that? And then after you pay for it, you got to go into Chrome and you got to go into Settings and you got to turn on this button. You know, it's such, it just felt like such a Wall Street gesture. So how, how then, if we can agree that we have some time horizon by which the search ad model and all of their incentives are going to mean they're slow to truly do it AI native?

• 27:28David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 27:29Speaker 02

  We have a window. What do we have to, we have only one shot. It's always been our shot. Build something absolutely awesome that people love. Can we do it? I don't know. But like, I think we are here because we did it once and we built a following for software that made people feel something in a category that they never cared about before. Going to be really hard to do it again, but I have faith that if we are, if we go back to our roots and we're as excited and optimistic and creative and open as we've always been, that's the only shot we got and it got us here. So.

• 28:00David Imel?

  Google also knows that people are going to be moving towards, you know, agents and asking their web browser full questions instead of searching in SEO. Right? Like, we've all been programmed over the years to search in SEO because we know how search engines work. People are slowly moving towards just using full questions in Google search.

• 28:19Speaker 02

  Talking like a human, not a robot.

• 28:20David Imel?

  Exactly. And that's the reason they introduced AI mode. And now they have the Chrome, like the Gemini agent in the corner. I hear you when you say like, oh, well, they don't want to destroy their ads business because that's their whole business. But I think they also understand, like, everyone else is moving that direction. So is your bet that you have, you don't have any reins on the fact that Google's ad business is going to get destroyed if they move towards this business where they're just serving you answers? And they're more constrained because they want to move towards that because they know everyone else is going to do it, but they need to figure out how to monetize it?

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, let me, let me tell you a story about that. And then I'm going to tell you what I'm really worried about. So it doesn't just sound like my founder. It's like, oh, we got this figured out. So someone that previously worked at the browser company is a guy named Darren Fisher that ran Chrome for, I think, 16 years or something like that. And he told me the story about there is this one feature where on the new tab page, underneath the URL bar, they show you your most visited websites. And they switched it to the favicons of the websites because it's much easier to quickly notice the Twitter icon, for example. Overnight tank global search revenue by 5%. Massive freak out. Now, actually, Sundar, to his credit, Sundar was the original PM on Chrome. Yeah, that was his first, that was the project to put him on that. Yeah. Great guy. Sundar seems like a wonderful human.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  He said, no, it doesn't matter. We're going to ship it. But there's a huge impact. If that tiny change does 5%, I don't know if it's exactly 5%, whatever it was. What happens when you change the URL bar, which an Apple VP told me is the most popular text box on all of macOS is Chrome's URL bar? Is that wild? That's crazy. Isn't that wild? If you change that to say, hey, how about 40% of the time we don't send you to Google? I just don't, I don't see it. I don't see it anytime soon. Now, the thing that really worries me, which I know I may not be in an audience that will believe this, and we can talk about it. I think the way we use the web and the internet is going to change faster than we expect. And I think if you get out of the building and talk to a cousin or a niece in high school or college,

• 30:28Speaker 02

  I worry much more about a world where AI chat interfaces like ChatGPT or pick your favorite one, actually just replace the browser wholesale at some point and sooner than we think. So what keeps me up at night is, is Chrome, not is Chrome going to add this button? And then the button's going to be a sidebar and then they're going to get it. It's going to be like, wait a minute, are we too close to it? Like, what, what comes really after? Because if you look at the similar waves, it wasn't the magazine on the internet, on the web, right? And so that, that's the thing that I think about is, are we being bold enough? Which it has a tension with our novelty tax. So our bet with DIA is. Make it look familiar. So in that 30 second budget that we have, you get it on Tuesday at 11 a.m.

• 31:10Speaker 02

  and you can just go. We import everything instantly. It generally looks the same. You feel the design craft and love. And then kind of reveal to you over time how powerful it is in these new ways without you having to learn new things. The risk, I think, is actually that we even are being too incremental and we're not being bold enough. Now, again, I have a bunch of reasons why I think we're in a good spot, but I think if I'm back here in a year and you invite me back and like it didn't work out, I promise you it's not going to be because Chrome did something with Gemini. It's going to be because even even though I'm coming on this podcast to say like, I know you think, you know, AI overviews aren't good, but like people are interfacing, they're talking to their computers, they're thinking where their computers are doing things they've never done before. It's going to be because we even underestimated how much that's going to change the way our user agents and we interface.

• 31:55Speaker 02

  And I think that's the thing that people, including me, missed is I was comparing these tools to Google. And you know, it's like I've been trained for decades to do this like robotic syntax.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  And so what I was do- Yeah. And so what I was doing is like I was doing that in Chat GPT. But that's not what people are doing net new use cases. They're talking to their computers and getting help with things they never did before. And I think we don't like, I think there's this weird stigma around it where you talk to someone, you get them in a quiet moment. And they'll like, I can't tell you the number of conversations I've had. It was like, man, this is kind of weird. Like, I'm kind of embarrassed to admit this, but like, I had like a 90 minute conversation with chat last night about this emotional topic in my life and I I teared up at the end and people are embarrassed. There's like this social stigma because of that political debate that I spoke about. So I just want to say the quiet thing out loud. We can think it's weird. It doesn't mean people are having sex with robots.

• 32:50Speaker 02

  And it doesn't mean that like, you know, we're all going to be out of jobs, but why can't we be excited and just name that like for the first time in like a decade or two, the way people are like using and doing things with the computers is changing.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  It is. It is fun to think about that. There's entire generations of people like we've, we've already done this with different like paradigm shifts, but like it's crazy to us, a bunch of 20, 30 plus year olds that there are people who don't know what a world of- Smartphones is like because they just became the thing that people use. And I think Google search has been one of those things for so long where everyone in this room knows how to do a Google search. And there is going to be a generation that grows up that never has to learn SEO speak. And just punches in whatever they want to know into a chatbot that can tell them ideally the correct answer, but some sort of answer. So that that paradigm shift, I think, is a fair bet to make.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  And it's just a matter of like following user behavior and building something that ideally is useful to that new behavior.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. And that's where that's where I think what we're excited about is not so much trying to better solve the. When was the, what year did the, you know, American Revolution start? I think Google's great for that. It's what are these net new things that people are doing? That they couldn't have done before is where that's the heat we're following or trying to.

• 34:08Speaker 01

  I have a stat right here because I was wondering this and I'd learned this before, but approximately 15% of all daily Google searches are brand new. Which is interesting. That was already interesting to me, but I bet the number of things people are typing into these chatbots that have never been typed before is sky high.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Extremely high just because we see that behavior is so new.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

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• 38:12Speaker 02

  Is AI a feature or a product? I feel very confident that in five years, on macOS or Windows, the application that has default browser permission will look much more similar to an AI chat interface than a browser, and the webpages that you access within them and the tabs you access within them are going to feel much more like tool calls or tools that that AI chat interface can wield for you and open for you, which doesn't mean you're not opening a big Figma link. It doesn't mean you're not typing in Google Docs. But I absolutely think without question, the hierarchy is going to flip.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  I'm not telling you it's going to be DIA for sure, but I feel incredibly... I mean, think about all the heat that we're getting right now. It's not fun, right? It's not, it's not, it's much more enjoyable to be like the art guy and everyone's like, "Oh, I love the little animations." I wouldn't do this. I would not do this if I didn't believe in my bones that this is one of those moments where the paradigm's going to shift, which doesn't mean we're going to succeed, but without question. And I'm like, I kind of wanted to come on here and give a little more of the raw, just timestamp it for myself, honestly, like in my, you know.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't know. I could be wrong. I could, I could be, I could be totally naive. But why I feel that conviction is this didn't come from Twitter. I got off Twitter. This is, I literally went to college campuses and just spent time with people unreal. And it's just. Can I ask one more question? I'm here as long as this is like cathartic for me. Okay. Yeah. How are you going to make money? We, we are going to charge for Dia. That is one of the other really interesting cultural shifts is like when we started the browser company, the idea that people would pay for software in a kind of broader sense was not a popular idea. And one of the things with these AI tools, I'm an angel investor in this company called Cursor that makes, it's sort of like Dia for coding. It's takes a traditional IDE VS code.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  And it doesn't just add a sidebar. It kind of imbues these AI models within every part of the IDE experience. It is the fastest growing software company of all time in terms of revenue ramp, in terms of the amount it charges every month. Now it's very different. Those are software engineers and it's much more valuable than Dia is today, but I think there is now finally a model where you can say, hey, if you really offer something that unique and valuable, especially because what is our, our argument is going to be this thing knows you better than any other AI chat tool. It knows you better. It really gets you and it's right there. So, yeah.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  Now, when you say charge for Dia, because I know as of right now, we're testing a version of it that's super early. Is it going to be, you're going to charge for the whole browser? Are you going to charge for a feature inside of Dia? Or what's the?

• 40:50Speaker 02

  No, we're gonna, we're gonna charge for a kind of a premium bundle at some point. So one of the things that's really interesting is we, we spoke briefly about how we built this ML model in our URL bar that routes you to different places. There are more and more of, I hate the word agents, but there are more and more of these like AI apps or agents coming online that are very specialized and actually often string together a bunch of different models and kind of custom prompting and tool integrations. You can imagine a world where just the base Dia is free. But then, you know, you can buy the like software engineering bundle or the sales and marketing bundle, or again, I'm making this up, but I, that's another thing is, oh, man, this industry is so bad with like naming and human words.

• 41:31Speaker 02

  But this concept of agents, though it is annoying to say that word, is, is, is really real and powerful in the things you can do when you string these models and tools together. And so I think as you see more and more of those kind of verticalized applications that are native to AI, being able to unlock those and route you to different places.

• 41:47David Imel?

  And do you believe like a mobile model works with that too? Cause like, we're not, you know, there's all these ideas of this company I O taking away your phone. See if that happens, but uh, do you see Dia also being on a mobile interface?

• 42:03Speaker 02

  You have to be, right? I think that was one of the reasons that you even took a while to get on Arc because we weren't on Android. So I think you have to be on mobile. I think the interface on mobile is much more of a remote control. So if you think about the desktop browsers primarily, go back to the TikTok analogy. Every tab you open, it's getting personalized to you. But actually that personalization is owned and controlled by you. And that's why we're, you know, doing things in the browser. Well, now if that is like kind of personalizing the algorithm, for lack of a better framing, when you're on your phone, you're just going to want to talk to it. Uh, and you're going to want to get its help, but it doesn't, it, it's kind of based in that awareness and knowledge that's compounded from desktop. But I think similar to Arc, what a browser is on mobile is very different than desktop.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  So I do not imagine a world, for example, where anyone is mobile only with Dia. That would miss the raw power, you know, it really needs, and I think if you go back to our first YouTube video and the original idea for the browser company, it was this idea of an internet computer, which was because the browser is popular because it's now an operating system because your apps and files are there. What that means is your computing life is in the cloud. It's all stored on a server somewhere. And if that's true, then your computer in air quotes should be able to go with you to any device because it's all just in the cloud.

• 43:13David Imel?

  Context follows you.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  Exactly. That still holds in this world, which means that, all right, if you're just on your mobile phone and you don't want to use Dia on desktop, you're, you're missing the power of that. But I think whether it's OpenAI or Google, that is where, you know, I think the thesis was right. Whether or not we win or not, which is your computer is going to increasingly feel like this deeply personalized AI model that goes with you across all devices. And different devices play different roles with mobile being more of like easy input, probably voice centric. With desktop playing the personalization engine that really knows what's going on in your life, especially your livelihood. I don't know what this I O thing is going to be, or your TV, or your car, but like, you better believe it's going to be there, too.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Good luck to them. I guess while we have you, the question, personalization is often like, on the opposite end of the spectrum is privacy, where if I am using Google's thing, Google has to know everything about me to deliver that level of personalization. And it's interesting hearing you guys have made your own models and are going to build things that like, keep all this context and knowledge about you. How much are you thinking about privacy? And if people care a lot about privacy, should they like something like this?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Yeah. Our view is giving people control, and just being very transparent. I think one thing that is true, though, is to get the most power from these models, it needs your personal context. Like, it's not even worth it if you're not willing to teach it about yourself. And so I think at some point, actually, these MacBooks and your phones are going to get strong enough, and open source models are going to get small enough and powerful enough that they can run locally on device. In the meantime, you have to be okay sending your data to an API that is gonna, you know, integrate it into the model. But I mean, as you know, what we found is like, people will make that trade, actually the same friend I was talking about, he's gonna hit me for saying this. I had this moment where I was like, you gotta ban TikTok. Like, this is just, this is just bad for, like,

• 45:02Speaker 02

  get rid of it, right? And he's like, honestly, it brings me so much joy giggling at these TikTok videos all day, like, the CCP can have it all if like, my time on the toilet feels like that enjoyable. So I would say that is on one extreme of the spectrum, but generally, I think if you show up to someone like, hey, you're busy, you got a lot of stuff going on in your life, here's this thing that can actually help you in meaningfully new ways, and all you have to do is browse like you've always browsed, and we're just gonna use your browsing data and, you know, to train an AI model to be better for you. I actually think as many people would be willing to do that.

• 45:35Speaker 01

  Andrew, you had a question?

• 45:36Andrew Manganelli?

  Yeah, I had a question, and it's not DIA specific, but AI browser specific, and maybe since yours in this is a question we ask all the time, and might be able to shine some light on it. But we talk all the time about these like, conversational, like, searches instead of old school links and everything like that. And a lot of that comes down to like, what's the best TV I should buy? You know, asking a question's consumer based, but it's scraping data from websites where a reporter spent time, where that reporter gets paid by advertisements on the site. How or have you thought about at all whether it's DIA or just in general, like, how are people like that compensated? Or even like, you know, we make YouTube videos and we, there's lots of stuff about ChatGPT probably scraping a ton of YouTube videos. So like,

• 46:21Andrew Manganelli?

  we're losing viewers. The people who are doing the original personal content are potentially losing out. And then it gets to the old dead internet theory of later on, like, who's going to be making these articles that AI scrapes from anymore?

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, so.

• 46:36Andrew Manganelli?

  Sorry, that's a very big question.

• 46:37Speaker 02

  No, I don't get to come on the podcast and just get the softball. I was like, I'm here as long as you guys want. So there's the kind of the DIA specific, what we've observed. And I think there's the larger ecosystem question. On the DIA side, this goes back when we started, when I first had my own ideas about AI, I was thinking about it much more in the what are the things I already do in a search engine or browser? And how do we, how does AI make it better? And that's where I was missing the forest for the trees. What we see in DIA is people aren't using it to do that sort of stuff. It's a, it's almost like a companion or a partner on whatever they're working on. So, you know, an example that we put in a video, which came from a college student is you're buying a used car, you have two links of similar models side by side and in DIA split screen, which is the same as Arc's.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  And you're like, what's the difference? I'm not a car guy. Like, help me understand the difference. And then you have DIA sidebar or DIA's chat sidebar as a way to kind of like work through and understand the difference between those. That's true with writing. You have a document open and you're working through it and you have it right there side by side. So what we're seeing is the most popular use cases in DIA are less of a, hey, I was doing this before and now I'm doing this. And much more like, I couldn't turn to my computer to have opinions before. My computer never had opinions. It couldn't be subjective. And now it can. So that is kind of what I was saying before about the narrative. We get so locked into these kind of memes in our industry that I think we're missing what people are generally actually doing.

• 48:00David Imel?

  So it's less of a, I'm going to Gemini, I'm going to ChatGPT and just asking random questions. And it's more of a, I'm using my browser, like I've always used a browser, but now I'm just understanding the context of what's on the page better.

• 48:11Andrew Manganelli?

  Of the page I've.

• 48:12David Imel?

  Yeah. That I've already opened.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Again, I haven't been on any press or anything yet. So I'm still working through how to talk about this, but think about it like this. One of the ideas behind Arc was that. How do you put what's what matters to someone's life at the top instead of these tech ideas? And what I mean by that is like, you got to buy a used car. That's at the top of the pyramid. That's what matters to you. And so in order to do that, you need car sites and you need to read things and you need to check out the photos and all that stuff. What is new is now our computers can have the perception of thinking, having opinions, giving feedback, critiquing, joking. And that is just a new tool in the toolkit of buying a used car. And so what's new is that second, in my opinion, it's that almost emotional intelligence, not the IQ.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  That is so new and what people are really turning to it for, not just doing the thing we used to do, that old tool we had in a new way where there's definitely that. To come back to your ecosystem question, which is what I think you were really answering, though. This is where I think other people go on podcasts and stuff. I have no idea. No one has any idea. And I think it's one of, I don't want to, I don't know if scary is the right word, but like the web as we know it was broken, is breaking even faster. And some, it just doesn't make sense anymore. So I don't, I don't, not only do I not have an answer to what replaces the web and the incentive structure. I haven't heard anything from anyone that suggests.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  And, and it's just this complex problem where it's what's so wonderful about the web is it's decentralized and it's open. There are so many different actors and players in it that kind of need to work together. And in 2025, we don't generally work together on things that affect all society very well right now. So I don't know, man, but this is why it just, it feels like it's coming. And our approach has always been, we have this value, assume you don't know, which is like, we have no idea what we're doing. So how do you proceed if you have no idea what you're doing? You build stuff really quickly. You go to the MKB HD office, you give them DIA. They tell you, you got a lot of work to do. You go back to work, you come back. And so like our approach is like, just get in there, have these conversations and try our best.

• 50:15Speaker 02

  But in terms of like, how are publishers like, insert your favorite publisher that post text based blog posts that were accessed through Google search engines? What happens after that?

• 50:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 02

  We're about to find out.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  It is a big question. I was just gonna mention, cause like I, one of my biggest pet peeves is I'll be on Twitter and I'll post a video and someone will be like, "Grock, tell me what this video says." And then they'll like summarize the video and be like, "Great, I'm not gonna watch the video now." Great, okay. So now, half the people who were gonna watch it lose that information bit. But, you know, some people will still watch it for entertainment value. And, you know, to, to use the like, buying a used car analogy, there, there are so many different behaviors that I see, which is, there are people who just wanna speedrun learning about the car. Don't really care too much about it, but just need to know like, what's the difference between these two cars? And that is going to pull from some Motor Trend article reviewing the car passionately.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  That's going to pull from some YouTube video of a guy who used the car for years and did a daily driver 30-minute video. And that kinda breaks a little bit when the incentive goes away. But it also will potentially be a world where someone will go to the Motor Trend article, and will read some of it, and will ask the, the sidebar chat for more information or more context to better understand it. Or they'll watch the 30-minute YouTube video, and 10 minutes in, they'll pause and ask for some more context to better watch the video. So, there's different behaviors, there's different directions that this could go. We don't know. No one seems to know exactly what's gonna happen, but it's interesting.

• 51:50Speaker 02

  And I would take the other side on one specific part. I think that the most kind of soulful, original, in-depth brands and publishers are gonna do better than ever. Right? I actually think the MKBHDs of the world, I don't think people are dumb. And I think when you're gonna buy a gadget, or you're trying to understand something that matters to your life, I think you're gonna turn, especially in a world of all this AI-generated everything, I think you're gonna turn to the best of the best more than ever, and I think you're gonna be willing to pay more and do more than ever before.

• 52:24Speaker 02

  What happens to the long tail of the blog that covers air conditioners in a kind of more SEO-driven way and that sort of that that type of business and media company? I have no idea, but like if I can invest in MKBHD in the world of AI, I would invest a lot of money. And I'm not just saying that because I'm here, I really believe it. And I think in some ways you even see that a little bit with the browser company. Like I've, I've always thought about how people's love for, maybe loves is a strong word, but endearment to what we're doing and how we're doing it far outweighed our scale. You know, like we wrote a Substack post yesterday that announced nothing new. It just shared some new data in a clearer way and it like was at the top of tech meme, which like everyone in the industry reads.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  That is, that is disproportionate with our user, with everything. I was cool, but it didn't make any sense to me. And because I think the way we showed up in the world had a little more soul and spirit and opinion and personality than other startups did. And I think that across industries, including media is just going to continue. And I think it's going to, by the way, I don't know, there's nothing to do with us, but I just, I just think people are, they can feel that character. And I think in a world of AI, people are going to gravitate towards that more and more. Still breaks a lot of media, you know, I don't know who sells ad for this podcast, but they probably disagree, but like, I think you all are good. You are good. You can rest easy that you all are good.

• 53:48Andrew Manganelli?

  Our like anecdotal version of that is no matter how much we make of like a review of something, Marquez will get X amount of people, like dozens, if not hundreds of people being like, oh yeah, but what do you really think of like this phone? And like, that feels like the type of average person to me that's going to go into that AI chat and be like, what does Marquez like, which phone should I buy? And then not actually go into our video that we spent a lot of time making and, and let it decide for them and like, when it's pulling from our stuff or when it's pulling from a Verge reporter doing a review of that, that's where.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  What is, is your, are the graphs that you care about relative to 12 months ago? Are they up? Are they in the middle or are they down?

• 54:30Speaker 01

  I think they're in the middle, but I've always also thought about the videos that, and we are so in the weeds, but it's fine.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  Isn't that the point of this?

• 54:36Speaker 01

  It is, it is a point. I think the, I think of our audience as kind of two main buckets. One subscribes and watches videos purely for entertainment value and not for any information or should I buy it at all?

• 54:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:48Speaker 01

  And so they'll watch, one of the most common questions I get or answers that I get is, oh, I love the videos. I never buy anything you're making videos about, but I just like watching them. And then the other bucket is purely informational. They are here because they are on a quest of finding information and figuring out if they should buy the thing or not. And I think part of what we're talking about here is wiping out one of the buckets, which is that second one, which is I am here for the information. Pause the video, ask it a question, get the answer, peace out. And the entertainment portion, which we happen to have an audience that's here for that too, will remain. And I think what we're probably more concerned about is those that have way less of the entertainment value and are more on the SEO end of like,

• 55:29Speaker 01

  we have a mission of like delivering information about these products and people don't like show up here for entertainment necessarily. They just come here for the information.

• 55:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  And now those people aren't going to come here anymore.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:39Speaker 01

  So that's, that's one of those scary questions, I think, for that specific type of publisher.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah. I would say, I mean, I think it depends on the query. So I think for a query about the American revolution is different than I'm going to buy something in my life. At least what we've seen, it's very anecdotal is I think people treat the first result back from an AI chat tool in the same way they treated a Google like results page. It's a jumping off point. I don't think that's true for all types of queries, but for these types of queries. But I, you know, David Pierce from The Verge has said something again and again, that has really stuck with me. That is, and I'm going to paraphrase. And sorry, David, you did this on your own podcast about something I said, so I get to do this.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  We're fine.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Just like media companies need to make the best products and they need to think about what they do as products.

• 56:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:23Speaker 02

  And so I have no doubt that whatever is going on in your graphs, whatever you're worried about, this crew and this office setup is awesome. You're going to make a better product. And so that's actually part of the reason I'm kind of like doing this and doing the Substack posts is I regret not being unapologetically open to the idea that this was all going to change, even if I didn't buy into this AGI and all this other stuff. And like, what do we got to do to be ready? And so I feel like in some way, it's like, okay, if that's what you're worried about. You have so much creativity in the tools here that I have no doubt you will make a better product for I want to buy X. How do you do it than whatever thing is going to pop out of some AI model?

• 57:04David Imel?

  Yeah, I think, yeah, there's gonna, again, we don't know what the behavior of the user in the future is. We know what we see now, and we know where the trends are inflecting towards.

• 57:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 57:11David Imel?

  But how much they change and whether they totally flip on their head is a completely unanswered question, which I think is something we might lose a little bit because we're so focused on the now, and I think it's an interesting thing to consider.

• 57:22Speaker 02

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

• 57:38David Imel?

  Quibi.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Right? Yeah. And so the reason I say that is like, I think it's, it is exhilarating, if not a little bit scary, but it's just, there's a moment of creation and rebirth happening here and in some ways that are a bummer. And in some ways that are like, man, I'm, I gotta, I got two sons that I'm like, man, I'm not excited for how we deal with that in a bit. And in other ways, it's like, I bet you come here every day to do things like, how do we do this new product challenge? You know, like, you wouldn't be doing this. You would have sold this company or done this a lot differently if you did enjoy that challenge. So that's how we're trying to show up to this is like, yeah, we have no idea, but how privileged are we that we are at the age we are in the industry that we are in this moment in time? Like, yeah, I know that sounds very cheesy, but.

• 58:22David Imel?

  To ground us a little bit, um, do you have like a timeline of when Dia will feel like this product that you are sort of pitching? Because I think right now, I think a lot of the backlash from ARC being, I don't know about sunset, but maintained and Dia coming out is that be like, part of the reason that people love ARC is because you built in the open.

• 58:45Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 58:45David Imel?

  Right? And now you're building Dia in the open. Um, I think a lot of those ARC users love the browser company. So they were frustrated that ARC was being sunset and.

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Not being sunset.

• 58:55David Imel?

  Not being sunset.

• 58:55Speaker 02

  Not being sunset.

• 58:56David Imel?

  Being maintained.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  Journalism.

• 58:58David Imel?

  Yep. Sorry. Being maintained. Uh, is that the version of Dia that people have access to right now is very bare bones and doesn't necessarily meet the, the more grand or. Ideas that you have for how you're going to interact with this AI browser? So do you have like a timeline of when people are going to be able to play with something that has those capabilities?

• 59:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, it obviously depends on what bits you're talking about, but I'll try to answer.

• 59:21David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 59:22Speaker 02

  By the way, yeah, some other point of review is I'd love to talk about the pros and cons of building in public and being transparent in public on YouTube. But yeah, actually, when my second son was born, I like left the hospital in Paris, actually, to go get food for my wife. And someone's like, hey, ARC, I love it. I was like, whoa, this is like a new, this is not what I thought was gonna.

• 59:42David Imel?

  Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  But anyway, to answer your question super directly, I'd say if you're someone that tried ARC or has never tried ARC, and you tried Dia to get to the bar where you're like, oh, this feels better than Chrome, six weeks? You are on an old version of it, but I feel good about that. In terms of the both, I'd say grander of what I'm talking about, which again was always there with ARC. So we're gonna be the internet computer operating system for their web. The grander and the, I'd say ARC members feeling like it has enough of the basic, you know, the things that they live, the vertical sidebar. I'd say somewhere between Labor Day and Thanksgiving. But again, on the, hey, you just browse like you normally do in this like model self-personalizes. That's going to be a many, many year thing, but what we did with ARC was just like, let's be honest about where we're going

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  and build it in public and around people like, you know. The other day, one of the things we're going to release soon and the kind of when we give it to ARC members very soon is there were these college students that were hacking our personalization features to make these mini apps, like almost like AI apps. So they created the syntax where they would be like, when I do backslash gadgets, I want you to do these 17 things. And so then they'd go, they'd hit a new tab and do backslash gadgets and then whatever they wanted to do. And they kind of like made their own little apps. And we're like, well, and multiple did for different use cases. And this goes back to the like native to the technology, native to the phone. Like.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  Well, that's pretty wild. And so what we've been sprinting to do, you know, that we weren't gonna do five weeks ago is like, man, we gotta formalize this and see if we make it even easier, what other people do. And so that's all to say, part of the reason that, you know, the grander, it won't be there, you know, right away is the stuff's hard and it takes time. But part of the reason is the reason ARC is so beloved is because we were like, we have no idea what we're doing. Let's put some stuff out there, see what people do react to it. And so we also want to have time to say, maybe the big idea here is actually AI native apps aren't going to be these agents. They're going to be these like user created and shared little mini apps that

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  It's an idea.

• 1:01:42Speaker 02

  It's an idea. It's a definite idea.

• 1:01:44Speaker 01

  I guess I'll throw out one more, and maybe we end this with this is a feature suggestion.

• 1:01:49Speaker 02

  Please.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  So I think you mentioned earlier, you know, ARC is maintained, DIA is rapidly evolving and maybe adds features from ARC.

• 1:01:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  And I think you spoke a lot about the novelty factor of like trying to keep it familiar, easy to understand, doesn't look too crazy. There's this setup process on a couple of different phones. I think Asus phones is one of them, super niche, but

• 1:02:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:02:09Speaker 01

  I log into the phone, I set up the phone, and then I land on a splash screen. And the splash screen is a direct fork between how do you want this to look? Just like Chrome? Or just like ARC? And I think if I was logging in for the first time and I was going to set up DIA and I was showing this to my cousin, he would just fork over and use the version that starts off looking just like Chrome. And I think a lot of people would see the make it look, give me the ARC stuff button, and they would click that button and they would love it.

• 1:02:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  I think that would be a hero button for DIA. If it, you know, obviously I think you want it to be a mass product and it will be a focus for the, for the future. I think a lot of people would love a lot of these features in DIA with just a click.

• 1:02:48Speaker 02

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

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:02Speaker 02

  I love that. We'll come back on the pod when that happens and give you a shout out.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  Deal.

• 1:03:06Speaker 02

  All right. Thank you so much.

• 1:03:08Speaker 01

  Thanks for joining us.

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  All right. That is it. Thank you again to Josh for joining us. And let us know what you think. Are those answers convincing? Do we think this browser has a future? Would you use something like DIA? Would you use something like ARC? Are you still going to be a Chrome person? Let us know in the comment section below. But either way, we'll see you guys very soon. Back with your regularly scheduled programming on Friday. See you then. Peace.

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