Soon you won't need to browse the web at all, Chrome will do everything for you: watch youtube ads, click on sponsored links, write positive reviews for restaurants buying ads from adsense, and write negative reviews for ones not advertising with google, fight with edge which browser is the default one. On the bright side, you will be able to enjoy more time offline.
Your comment reminded me of Douglas Adams' Electric Monk:
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
As a tab hoarder, I remember there were some attempts to implement rule-based tab organizer (using features like tab name, url, etc...) but most of them were only marginally useful for my case.
I wondered if generative models make any differences here so just tried it and a bit disappointed, it's consistently returning an error with a message "Tab groups suggestions are currently unavailable". It's just launched and the team might be experiencing lots of pages, perhaps I should try this again later.
Take this tab collection, build a model or a RAG or whatever around them:
- Let me chat with a bot that knows the information from the collection
- Use the information to generate a summary
- Let me guide it in generating a well sourced article
Build a knowledge graph from the web
- Trace a source of information back to the originating point to help eliminate derivative blog spam
- Help moderate media bias and challenge echo chambers
Automatically recognize spam, scams, etc.
Let me describe something I need in text, return back links to shopping sites that sell that thing, if nobody has it, generate a 3d model, or more formal description of it and supply me with connections to let me farm it out to an additive manufacture, one-off makerspace place or something.
Seriously, their first example seems useless to most people. Naming a tab group??? That doesn't take any time, little thought, and who does that regularly?
Summarizing an article seems like something everyone else can do OK. It's a huge avenue for bias (maybe that's why it's reasonably elided) but at least it's actually useful.
This is the only feature I'm excited about. I perpetually have 100+ tabs opened and have tried tab groups but eventually things get disorganized again. The ability to automatically group similar tabs, assuming it works, is going to be game changing.
> Seriously, their first example seems useless to most people. Naming a tab group??? That doesn't take any time, little thought, and who does that regularly?
Funny, naming things, whether variables or groups of things is the main reason I use LLMs to date. Add in grouping as well and that handles something that puts me under a lot of cognitive load, because I can never shake the feeling I have ot yet manually grouped things optimally.
I think for #2, they meant like AI-powered control-F / find in page.
Which is actually the first non-novelty AI tool I've heard someone pitch that actually sounded like a good idea. Way more visible failure mode than summarizing.
The vast majority of AI development right now fits the solution looking for a problem mold. People are pushing hard for the adoption of LLMs in areas where the existing solutions are not only more predictable, but require equivalent or less effort to using an LLM.
At some point the hype will die down and we'll find out where these tools actually fit, but yeah right now it's madness.
It is a neat "it can do that" kinda thing but I also wondered when I need that.
Having said that chrome customization has always kinda bit me in the butt eventually when something changes and looks odd now and ... I just tend to avoid it altogether now.
I had a thought while reading this, and I don't know if this would be the case but...
If it works by you hover over a link and Google gets the content in the browser behind the scenes and sends it to the mothership, where it's summarized and the summary then sent back to you to be displayed by the browser, then you may be accessing the linked page using your stored credentials, which give Google access to content they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
> Unlike other browsers that rely on cloud services, Firefox keeps your data safe on your device. There's no privacy risk of sending text to third parties for analysis because translation happens on your device, not externally.
Sounds like a sneaky way to add your personal social media feed into their AI training data.
Edit: the suggestion that translation functionality already does this is valid though perhaps this expands the scope to data in the users default language?
Should be doable with a local model, but there might be some trade-off here. I expect it to roll out to Pixel users first where Google has a better control.
Kind of amazing how unable to deliver Google seems to be here. Looking at Arc, a new player, and the kind of AI features they came up with, this here looks more like features developed by McKinsey rather than by someone with domain knowledge.
Readit News
"The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe."
The future is (almost) now: SponsorBlock[1] skips embedded ads in YouTube videos, based on crowdfunded timestamps.
[1]: https://github.com/ajayyy/SponsorBlock
Deleted Comment
I wondered if generative models make any differences here so just tried it and a bit disappointed, it's consistently returning an error with a message "Tab groups suggestions are currently unavailable". It's just launched and the team might be experiencing lots of pages, perhaps I should try this again later.
It organizes tabs and bookmarks by content similarity and does little more. Designed for tab hoarders in mind. :)
I looked in Experiments and it's not there either.
It's updated to the latest version.
AFAIK, this is geo limited to the US, at least for now.
- summarise an article
- find information on a given topic (free-form input text)
- full voice control ("click that link", "read that article", "find this")
- auto-submit a captcha
we have come full circle
- Let me chat with a bot that knows the information from the collection
- Use the information to generate a summary
- Let me guide it in generating a well sourced article
Build a knowledge graph from the web
- Trace a source of information back to the originating point to help eliminate derivative blog spam
- Help moderate media bias and challenge echo chambers
Automatically recognize spam, scams, etc.
Let me describe something I need in text, return back links to shopping sites that sell that thing, if nobody has it, generate a 3d model, or more formal description of it and supply me with connections to let me farm it out to an additive manufacture, one-off makerspace place or something.
- The circle continues
Summarizing an article seems like something everyone else can do OK. It's a huge avenue for bias (maybe that's why it's reasonably elided) but at least it's actually useful.
Funny, naming things, whether variables or groups of things is the main reason I use LLMs to date. Add in grouping as well and that handles something that puts me under a lot of cognitive load, because I can never shake the feeling I have ot yet manually grouped things optimally.
2. That doesn't really seem like a Chrome feature? Belongs more on Bard.
3. That seems like a Google Assistant feature too, some of that actually may work on a pixel phone, though might be nice to have on desktop too.
4. Will never happen. Google themselves have a captcha product so defeats the point.
[0] https://support.google.com/assistant/answer/14163109?hl=en
It is only on the Pixel 8, not the previous models and their mid-range $ variants so they aren't giving it away for free just yet
Which is actually the first non-novelty AI tool I've heard someone pitch that actually sounded like a good idea. Way more visible failure mode than summarizing.
Deleted Comment
At some point the hype will die down and we'll find out where these tools actually fit, but yeah right now it's madness.
Having said that chrome customization has always kinda bit me in the butt eventually when something changes and looks odd now and ... I just tend to avoid it altogether now.
https://addons.mozilla.org/uk/firefox/addon/tochunka-smart-t...
If it works by you hover over a link and Google gets the content in the browser behind the scenes and sends it to the mothership, where it's summarized and the summary then sent back to you to be displayed by the browser, then you may be accessing the linked page using your stored credentials, which give Google access to content they wouldn't otherwise have access to.
Edit: I stand corrected, Firefox does it offline! Thank you, Firefox team, this is awesome and I'll likely be using it more often now :)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/website-translation
Edit: the suggestion that translation functionality already does this is valid though perhaps this expands the scope to data in the users default language?