The Story of Josh Miller: Why the Web Browser Company Is About to Croak (Anthropic vs. OpenAI)

Josh Miller admits that he almost declined today’s interview about the Browser Company after laughing a few minutes into our conversation. The young CEO was jetlagged from a flight to Paris but still eager to talk about Arc, an alternative web browser with artificial intelligence tools. So, what’s the reason for his hesitancy? “We weren’t sure if we wanted more people to use it,” says Miller. “It’s legitimately a problem how [many] people are interested.” He has an obvious issue for a software leader.

On the cover of our 1997 March issue, WIRED editors declared, “The Web browser itself is about to croak.” Oh my gosh! Not only are browsers still here, ribbiting along, but developers continue to update the user experience of clicking around online.

The Browser Company added generative AI during the summer. “We’ve been pretty big AI skeptics ourselves,” says Miller. I am very wary of the hype. Despite some apprehension, users’ overall interest in the new Arc Max browser option was intense. The Browser Company was forced to reach out to OpenAI and Anthropic on Arc Max’s launch day after the new AI tool surpassed the allotted data limit.

Miller, who previously worked as a product manager at Facebook and the White House under Obama, led Arc to its 1.0 launch around the same time, sans chatbot tools. Positive reviews and influential users like Marques Brownlee helped to make the software a hit.

Even though OpenAI dominated the conversation in Silicon Valley throughout 2023 with its zeitgeist capturing products, like Dall-E 3 and ChatGPT powered by GPT-4, the chaos inflicted by the board’s decision to undermine Altman and speedrun through new CEOs may have created a window of opportunity for other AI companies. (Despite the fact that Altman eventually returned to continue leading OpenAI.) And while these product updates were months in the making, the timing couldn’t have been better for OpenAI competitors. Many enterprise customers of OpenAI’s tools, spooked by Altman’s exit, considered making a switch over to Anthropic or another provider while he was out.

Claude 2.1 was given two key updates by Anthropic. One of the reasons for this is that you can put more data into the chatbot at once. Claude’s token limit was set at 200,000, which is roughly the length of a 500 page book. (Sorry Leo Tolstoy fans, you’ll have to wait until future updates to analyze all of War and Peace in a single prompt.) To compare, the rate limit for the GPT-4 Turbo model, announced by Altman pre-firing, is capped at 128,000.

Anthropic claims that the new Claude is more likely to admit when it isn’t sure of an answer, rather than sticking to its guns. “We tested Claude 2.1’s honesty by curating a large set of complex, factual questions that probe known weaknesses in current models,” reads the company’s blog post. A lack of idiocy is a major issue for the bot.

Stable Video Diffusion, Claude 2.1, and Openai: Launches, News, and Theoretical Implications

When you input a prompt into a text-to-video model, the AI spits out GIF-like animations that can range from eerily beautiful to downright disturbing. Stable Video Diffusion can transform still images into videos with the addition of motion.

While this isn’t technically a new feature from OpenAI, the company rolled out ChatGPT with voice capabilities to everyone in the short period while Altman was out as CEO. Users who paid for the openai service,chatgtp plus, were the only ones who were able to use the feature.

The software developers at Openai took another step towards multimodality by giving the chatbot the ability to hold a conversation, even though it is not yet giving Spike Jonze’s Her. If it can accept input and provide outputs in a variety of ways, it can be an even more powerful chatbot. Who knows when it’ll learn how to smell.

Every week there is a new launch or announcement from one of the major players. So, my guess is that the launches of Stable Video Diffusion and Claude 2.1 were likely just a coincidence,” says Dharmesh Shah, who’s the CTO and cofounder of HubSpot as well as an OpenAI shareholder.

The turmoil at Openai has made entrepreneurs, journalists, and anyone who still has an account on the platform more interested in their timelines for the latest emojis and lower-case missives. In the meantime, some of the most prominent AI companies—including OpenAI—continued to do what Silicon Valley is known for: Drop new products.