Don't Chop Up Your Apple Trees to Make Barrels for Your Apples

The CEO of The Browser Company, the company behind the Arc browser, recently posted a lengthy Reddit post. He explained why they’ve abandoned Arc, and discussed a bit about their plans going forward.

They’ve made a huge pivot to an upcoming AI browser they’re calling Dia. But I just wanted to comment on this, very stupid, approach, from the portion about what makes an “AI browser” different:

1. Webpages won’t be the primary interface anymore. Traditional browsers were built to load webpages. But increasingly, webpages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces.

They really don’t see the major flaw in this approach?

The AI models are completely worthless without training data,¹ which they scrape from webpages. If people don’t visit webpages, the incentives to create the content disappears. What do they think this will do to the quality of the “tool calls” over time?

“Hmm, we need some barrels for all of these apples we just picked from our orchard… I got a great idea! The trees are worthless now, without apples – so let’s just chop them down and use the wood to make the barrels. I’m sure this won’t have any ramifications for the future.”