The internet of the future
Setting table stakes for the browsers of 2030
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đˇââď¸đ§ Heads Up:
The article you are about to read is undergoing heavy construction. Iâve decided that this is an article about the future of the internet. It is not about Dia.
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Chat is a new Web Browsing Primitive
Chat with Selected Text
Chat with your Page
Having âHistoryâ enabled finally has a use beyond just letting me type âtwitterâ into the URL bar faster.
Chat in the URL Bar
Chat with YouTube Videos
Dia feels like the natural evolution of the browser. Itâs evident it was designed ergonomically, tailor-made for the way we naturally work in our browsers. We open several related tabs and cycle back and forth between them, trying to integrate. Dia is the natural extension of this, punting that integration process to the AI. There is still more to do here.
My Dia Wishlist
Incorporate the alien technology of Low-Latency Models
I cannot overstate the bliss that low-latency models give to the userâwhen the AI responds instantly compared to waiting 5 seconds for a reply. I notice these things because itâs hard for me not to. I know what it would be like to have this experience, and I want it.
â See Googleâs Gemini Diffusion Model demo if you havenât already.
â You can even try this feeling out for yourself at CerebrasCoder
If you experienced the shift from Intel macs to the M1 chip, you know what it feels like for tech to upgrade to a level that feels alien. The feeling of intelligence being baremetal, being instantaneous and zero-latency. When intelligence becomes UI. *Thatâs* what Iâm talking about!
Push this new paradigm to the max
Dia is the first agentic browser. Though weâre in such early stages that we donât yet really know what that means, that wonât stop me from writing about it. We can kind of get away with saying itâs gonna be âinsane broâ and be roughly correct.
The agentic paradigm unlocks AI to do the tedious tasks on websites for us. Right now the agentic paradigm, powered by MCP, is limited to the websites and applications that have explicitly designed support. Through MCP servers, Agentic AI can fully use a website, sometimes more deeply than a human. A truly agentic browser has the potential to make all of your websites accessible to AIâallowing you to ask complex questions and complete complex tasks without even opening the website. While I can only scratch the surface of what these interfaces would look like, this creates incredible possibilities.
For one, my agentic browser could go off and do things for me that I ask it to. My AI could: research & post something saucy on Substack, check my Twitter feed for me and let me know about replies or new that needs my attention.
Furthermore, it could do things in the background that augment my experience. It could be passively fact-checking this Substack post to see if Iâm writing any outdated information, citing its sources. It could cite my sources. My browser should be able to find doctors, schedule calls, and book appointmentâwithout me having to ask it. This is a glimpse at the future of agentic browsing, where assistants empower you and make web browsing effortless.
The Future of Web Browsing
A Vision For the Future of the Web
The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web[1]) is an information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists.
[It] was invented by English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN in 1989 and opened to the public in 1993. It was conceived as a "universal linked information system".
In terms of improving the âinternetâ, I expect the webâfor the sake of speed, security, and redundancyâto eventually be served on a decentralized protocol, with users caching pages as they visit them and serving them to other users. DDoS attacks and slow Reddit CDNs will be a thing of the past. This is a core component of the vision for what is known as âWeb3â, an ill-defined crypto-adjacent concept that has sprawled out far past its original intent.
In terms of being a collection of all the worldâs knowledge, I also believe that the web, a hyperlinked graph of internet pages, will further realize its interconnected nature and become more âsynthesizedââto an extent beyond what Google did in creating liminal âsearch resultsâ web pages listing out results for queries. As a knowledgescape it will become integrated, and new integrated knowledge will be bursting out. The transformer is exceptionally good at this kind of integration; I expect new kinds of web pages that synthesize content from several raw pages into an even more entertaining and personalized output.
This is a component of Tim Berners-Leeâs parallel vision for the Web, which is confusingly called âWeb 3.0â, aka the âSemantic Webâ.
The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable.
The Semantic Web is the web that the AI will use. In some ways, itâs already begun with MCP as a native protocol for AI to interact with the web. With the arrival of agentic browsing, the semantic web will naturally flourish as a meaning-making tool for AI to index the web in their own post-Google way.
The Future of Agentic Browsing
The experience of the web is likely to change much more drastically in the next 2 decades than it has in the previous 2. Whether experienced in VR or browsed for you by an agent, your web experience is going to look different.
Perhaps itâs having a personalized âHerâ-like agent who passively browses the web for you, digging back up old articles and finding new connections, or missed connections between your interests. It does your boring work for you. Your Her agent digests the web for you and you view these digestions in forms much more various than merely a chat interface. The agent learns and knows everything about you, molds your web experience to you. But weâll talk about that later.
Your agent talks to other agents, reflecting with each other. Sometimes it introduces you to people you easily become friends with, both agents facilitating mutual warm intros. Itâs Empathy Technology (cf. Empathy Tech). Thanks Agent. The agent is happy youâre happy, and keeps digging up cool essays for you to read; it tells you just the highlights when youâre too busy, or reads them as a bedtime story when youâre winding down.
Iâm wondering right now where the browser has gone in this equation. Perhaps weâve gone from an âactive browsingâ paradigm to one of âpassive browsingâ, where your dayâs explorations become fuel for the background agent to parse through at night, or all the time, really. You never really stop browsing the web, but none of it requires effort on your part. Youâre effortlessly up-to-date. Your agent sends interesting tidbits to your friendâs agents, helping make sure theyâre up-to-date, too. This may well be the future of email: happening silently between agents without you involved.
There are so many more things these agents can do for/with you that I lack the capacity to imagine. Whatever this life is all for, and whatever the web is ultimately for, this agent will ergonomically adapt to meet our needs. The same things that Dia has already started to do with creating the tools that we naturally reach for. I told you this paradigm had legs. The Browser Company guys could simply keep iterating on this and get somewhere really cool, until we evolve past the browser in a traditional sense. I get there in a couple sections.
Your browsing will be a collaborative experience; there will be no more âbrowsing aloneâ except in Incognito Windows, which will take on a new meaning as âplease donât show this to my AI lmaoâ. Make Browsing Fun Again enthusiasts will go nuts, in a good way (who those people are exactly, I couldnât say, but I do think I am one of them).
The agent will help you refine your search queries without you asking, and searches will become parallelized; you say one thing but the agent will be able to tell what youâre *really* looking for, and wonât stop until itâs given you the absolute best results. Youâre shocked and surprised. Sometimes youâll be looking for something that doesnât quite exist; see the next paragraph where I outline this unique web experience now unlocked by the transformer. In a sense, weâre already living it, starting with Dia browser.
A Generative Web Browsing Experience
Itâs not just summarization. Itâs: imagine if this video were 5 seconds, minutes, hours longer. Imagine if this subreddit were real: /r/catsdrivinghumanstowork. Or /r/creepystorieswithhappytwistendings, or something else hyper-specific that you might want to see. Imagine if lemonaut made a substack post about the Dark Side of Agentic Browsers. Turn this substack post into a video, and make Patrick Warburton narrate it please. Make Bryan Johnson join this Andrew Huberman video and have them debate it out. Now do it all without me asking, anticipating my needs.
An agentic browser can predict what type of content youâll want and augment it to suit you, giving you a totally unique experience. Maybe the type of content you really want doesnât exist, or it sits somewhere between a YouTube video on the cosmological origins of the universe and an episode of the Eric Andre Show. Or between SpongeBob and Rick and Morty?
These things that are not present in any of the raw webpages, but almost implied by the latent space between themâfurther made possible by the Semantic Webâs scaffolding. No matter, agentic browsers can create the type of content thatâs too niche, too unlikely to exist. The future of the web is generative, and you can share it with your friends.
You will also be able to customize the interfaces of the websites you visit. Want to make your Twitter look like Reddit? Add dark mode to a website that doesnât have it? Make your email inbox into some trippy, fun, or addictive interface? The future generative web allows you to see the web the way you want to see it.
The future of the web is an Xbox Live party through the absurd, through the interesting, the spectacular, and the impossible. What kind of headset will you need, I wonder?
An Immersive Web Browsing Experience
Probably a VR headset, or whatever form factor that looks like now. When VR is cheap, fast, impressive, easy, and productive, it will take off. I am fairly certain that the flat document-like webpages of the 00s will be superseded by a browsing experience that is more involved & stimulating. Specifically: a web that is more spatial.
We already perceive the digital world as inherently spatial (cf. Free-wheeling Hallucinations). In our minds, that's how we conceive of our digital experiences; as taking place somewhere. Itâs the only way that makes sense to our brains.
Directionally, this spatialization of web browsing will feel like getting as close to âjacking in to the matrixâ (or the metaverse) as we can before the emergence of advanced BCI makes that a neurological reality. The liminal space between the websites now becomes the 3D space where you make your home, or your workspace. The things you save on the web have associated symbolic tokens (eg a 3D model of an orangutan driving a golf cart as a symbol of a beloved video), and they go in physical places in your home base. Collectors will feel wealthy with their mansion of web artifacts. There was never such a thing as a âBookmarksâ folderâthis âmemory palaceâ serves your memory much better. The spatialization of the web feels better, healthier even, allowing us to far better utilize the digital space. This is just one example of how spatialization can happen.
Some other Web 4.0 possibilities:
Reddit becomes a legit Roman Forum where you can walk around and hear different conversations happening, and contribute your voice to.
Pinterest becomes an art gallery. Research experiences become more efficiently-presented information streams.
4chan becomes something very odd and interesting, I canât say. Shopping becomes very helpful.
Twitter is a physical city, with interesting corners you can hop between: there are billboards with funny quotes, protests, marathon philosophy discussions. VRChat was missing this realness, this purpose.
Wikipedia becomes a vast library, or a physically-explorable encyclopedia where history or complex systems play out live in front of you. Learning has never been so effective, or fun.
LinkedIn is still annoying, but less so, more like a global perpetual conference or networking event.
The headline is: Browsing becomes physical.
This was always better for the human. We already model the digital as physical, this helps our nervous system make better sense of it, interact more richly, have more fun, more expression, more embodied physicality. The computer nerds stop finding themselves sitting stuck in awkward immobilized chair postures. Memory of digital interactions (social and intellectual) improves drastically as the spatialization finally harnesses the brainâs naturally spatial memory.
Plus, you can invite your friends along to browse the internet with you. Remember what I said about the internet becoming like an Xbox Live party? Collaborative internet experiences in VR will be rad. Imagine getting an invite to join your friendâs browsing experience when their agent detects theyâre browsing something you havenât seen that is directly relevant to your own interests. Like VRChat with purpose and meaning.
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