Could your browser be the ideal AI interface?

Under the sneaky guise of a recruitment video, Arc have recently teased a few features from their upcoming product, Dia. And it's pretty exciting.

An unexpected product pivot

Before we dive into Dia, there's a bit of catching up to do.

Arc was founded in 2019 to revolutionise the boring old browser. Some of their more unique features were:

• A sidebar instead of a top nav.

• The ability to swap between 'Spaces', sort of like individual profiles.

• Deep customisation including split views, colours, themes, etc.

• Peek, the ability to preview a link without clicking it.

Their browser launched in beta in 2022, and then to the wider public in 2023.

Less than a year later, Arc announced a pivot. More than a pivot, in fact: a complete start from scratch… No one’s quite sure why, but there are strong theories:

Introducing Dia, the AI-first browser

This gets us to today, and this excellent recruitment/product demo video:

To get smart brains to come to work for him, CEO Josh Miller walks us through his vision for the AI-first browser, Dia, and a few feature demos.

"The next era of computing is going to revolve around AI. But AI isn't going to exist as an app or a button. It'll be a new environment built on top of a web browser," he begins. "Because we're building it at the browser layer, we get to reimagine fundamental computing interfaces."

The video shows three demos.

Blinker

Arc are reinventing the black, scary vertical line blinking on your screen, awaiting your keystrokes. Instead of needing to swap to a different tool (they show ChatGPT, for example), Dia allows you to call AI directly from the blinker.

In the demo, we see Dia can finish sentences by pulling information from the open web. We see more options ("How can I help", "Give me an idea", and "Summarize a tab") but these are not demoed.

URL bar

With Dia, the URL bar is no longer just a URL bar. In the demo, we see Josh use it to ask questions and give tasks to the AI. The bar becomes an interface in and of itself.

Cursor

Perhaps most surprising of all is the cursor demo. Josh asks us to imagine having "a second cursor" (other than the one you control) doing 'things' for you.

In the demo, Josh instructs his automated cursor to take a list of items, find them on Amazon, and add them to his cart.

The extra cursor essentially becomes a robot process automation tool (with added LLM capabilities).

So, when's this going live?

Soon, apparently! Arc hint at a beta release in "early 2025", aka a couple of months away.

It's unclear how much of these demos and prototypes were heavily human-guided or fully autonomous. But, regardless, it's hard not to root for Josh and his team as they attempt to realise this bold product vision.