Let me just explain the demo that got me excited about Surf<\/a>, a new browser coming from a startup called Deta. Max Eusterbrock, one of Deta\u2019s cofounders, shared his screen with me over Zoom and asked me to pick a YouTube video. I told him to search for Cleo Abram\u2019s latest, about digging through the center of the Earth<\/a>. \u201cDo you have a question for the video?\u201d Eusterbrock asked. I took a second to figure out what he meant, then remembered Abram had mentioned something about exactly how deep the Earth is. Eusterbrock opened the browser\u2019s built-in chat window and typed in my question. A moment later, it returned the answer, plus a timestamp and a link to the exact spot in the video that addressed it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n What Surf did was both very cool and, in an AI-processing sense, actually pretty straightforward. It grabbed the automatically generated transcript from the YouTube page and quickly used an AI model \u2014 a combination of OpenAI tech and Deta\u2019s own \u2014 to run my question as a semantic search to see where the video answered it. It found the right spot, generated the answer and the link, and was done.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Surf is still in its early stages. Deta is calling it version 0.1, with a full public release planned for next year. It\u2019s only a desktop browser for now, and Eusterbrock says he expects most people won\u2019t use it as their only browser anytime soon. Other than all the AI stuff, it\u2019s pretty basic \u2014 it\u2019s based on Chromium, shows a bunch of horizontal tabs at the top, you already know the drill. It\u2019s a browser.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But inside that demo is the big idea behind this browser, and a peek at why everyone\u2019s so interested in connecting AI to the open web. Surf\u2019s main character is the chatbot, which lives in the sidebar and has total access to everything you see and do in your browser. (Terrifying security nightmare? Maybe! Deta\u2019s planning to do as much processing as possible locally, which should help.) You tell the chatbot what to look for, and you tell it which things to care about. Because it\u2019s a browser and not a ChatGPT clone, it can also see your private docs, your email, and everything else you see online.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Surf\u2019s core construct is the \u201ccontext.\u201d A context is like a folder \u2014 in early versions of the app, it\u2019s actually called <\/em>a folder \u2014 and you can fill each one with notes, links, and even screenshots and files, all of which live natively in your browser. Surf\u2019s chat can then query anywhere from a single file to an entire context all at once. It\u2019s a bit like Google\u2019s NotebookLM<\/a> \u2014\u00a0another way to find things and ask questions across links and documents \u2014 but it\u2019s built right into the browser. When you save something to your \u201cstuff,\u201d the app\u2019s space for unsorted things, Surf can automatically suggest you add it to a related context.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are lots of other AI-powered features inside of Surf, too. When you select text in a PDF, rather than copy and paste the gobbledygook that sometimes comes out, the browser will use OCR to take a screenshot, read the text, and paste it out more cleanly. You can use the chatbot to tweak webpages, too; Eusterbrock navigated to Hacker News, told the bot to hide everything other than \u201cShow HN\u201d posts, and it automatically did so. Surf can\u2019t actively use web apps on your behalf, but it can see everything currently on the page and make use of it however you\u2019d like.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Deta has been working on future-of-computing stuff for a while, starting with a whole cloud-based operating system called Space<\/a> that could run in a browser tab. But Eusterbrock and his colleagues discovered that building a new OS also required building countless new apps and services. \u201cWe had all these apps \u2014 like a Notion clone, but a lot worse than Notion,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd the big limitation of being a browser tab is you can\u2019t support Notion inside a browser tab.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Instead of building the whole OS from scratch, Deta decided that the most powerful thing to be was actually the browser itself, able to operate across tabs and apps and websites. (This is roughly the same theory that animates The Browser Company\u2019s work<\/a> on Arc and Dia<\/a>, it\u2019s why OpenAI is looking into building a browser<\/a>, and you could even say the same about Google and Chrome. If you control the browser, you can control the web.) There is some Space DNA in Surf, though, like the desktop-style homescreen where you can pin stuff for easy access and a universal search system.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Deta\u2019s plan is ultimately to charge for the AI features, Eusterbrock says. He compares it to apps like Obsidian<\/a>, which have a basic app for free but charge for extra and connected services like sync and publishing. \u201cOnce we have costs on the cloud side,\u201d he says, \u201cthat\u2019s where we think we can make a business out of this.\u201d Deta has a lot of feature ideas, a lot of new ways to organize your life through AI. And if it can build a browser you\u2019re willing to use, it can do almost anything.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n