Arc Had Millions of Users. Why They Left It Behind for Dia. | Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company

Summary

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AI and I — Episode Summary

Podcast: AI and I
Host: Dan Shipper
Episode: Arc Had Millions of Users. Why They Left It Behind for Dia. | Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, The Browser Company Cofounders
Date: July 2, 2025

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Episode Overview

In this lively, heartfelt conversation, Dan Shipper sits down with Josh Miller and Hursh Agrawal, cofounders of The Browser Company (makers of Arc and now Dia), to trace the tumultuous and visionary journey from pioneering a beloved browser (Arc, with millions of users) to a courageous full reset in the AI era with their new product, Dia. What does it mean to abandon a successful product, withstand public criticism and self-doubt, and bet everything on a seismic platform shift toward “the intelligent, personal, AI-powered browser”? This episode explores the vision, pain, and discovery behind that leap, illuminates the making of Dia, and teases broader lessons on technology, product design, and finding courage as a founder.

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Key Themes & Discussion Points

1. The Leap from Arc to Dia: Recognizing the Platform Shift

• The Decision to Pivot (00:00–07:00):

  • Josh and Hirsch reflect on the heady early days after Dia's private beta and admit last year "sucked," despite Arc's traction.
  • They stress that a profound technological shift—the arrival of powerful LLMs—drove the pivot more than “fixing Arc’s growth.”
  • Josh on the excitement:

    "What feels like your computer in five or ten years is actually going to be this layer that sits across all of your devices... You’re turning to it for this personal intelligence layer that is a wild invention of humanity." (00:35, Josh Miller)

• Why Arc Couldn’t Make the Leap (05:15, Hirsch):

  • "ARK had this problem we call the novelty tax: so much new stuff, which attracted early adopters but made the mass market hesitant. We tried so many things to make ARK approachable, then AI started taking off..."
  • Internal inertia: "We loved ARC so much that we were hesitant to change it... We really had to start from scratch."

2. Internal and Community Tensions

• Public Backlash & Internal Struggle (07:08–09:37):
  • The team underestimated the strong negative reaction from Arc fans and underestimated the challenge of getting their own team—who joined for Arc, not “the next thing”—on board.
  • Founders’ self-doubt:

    "It wasn’t just me and him anymore... At every moment, Hirsch and I looked across a table and said, ‘Should we do this?’ But we were running a company with 70 people, millions using the product… Internally, that was a winding journey." (08:20, Josh Miller)

3. The Catalysts: LLMs, New Interfaces, and the “Intent Funnel”

• The Spark (10:04–12:13):

  • The founders describe the spell cast by large language models:

    "You can’t stop thinking about it. You're staying up till 3am. Every bone is screaming this is why we got into software." (10:04, Josh Miller)

    • They started experimenting—first with an “Arc Search” mobile companion.
      • Instead of returning search links, Arc Search would generate a webpage as the direct answer.
      • Its simplicity and explosive user reaction revealed a key design lesson: "Change only one thing at a time; make that one thing what you talk about."

• Strategic Realization — The Browser’s Two Crucial Roles (14:36, Hirsch):

  • Browsers both funnel intent (search) and act as an application platform.
  • AI fundamentally changes both—fulfilling user intent directly, using tools, and integrating context.
  • This alters the role and opportunity for browser software itself.

4. The Messy Path to “We Have to Start Over”

• Indecision and Leadership Lessons (17:24–20:31):

  • Months of indecision, regret over not calling the pivot sooner:

    “It probably wasn’t until September last year that we made the call to say it is a completely new product called something completely different with no connectivity to Ark... That period is the one I regret most.” (17:24, Josh Miller)

  • Conviction about AI was scary—technology was unproven, and “AI browser” sounded like hype.

• Team Culture to the Rescue (23:12, Josh Miller):

  • Company benefited from deep prototyping culture: “Assume you don’t know. Prototype it and see.”
  • The gradual build of capability and confidence allowed staff to come on board slowly, despite initial anxiety.

5. Why Not Just Keep Arc? Taking the Big Swing

• Mission Alignment over Incremental Growth (26:17, Josh Miller):

  • “Why wouldn’t you be OK with a couple million-user browser that makes decent money? ... The motivation was always to build something at that [world-changing] level of ambition, not to make a niche productivity app.”

• The Broader Shift—and Memory as a Central Differentiator (28:39, Hirsch):

  • Pivot was about capturing an AI platform moment, not just building incrementally better browser features.

6. Building Dia: Technical and Product Design Reinvention

• Architectural Overhaul for Speed & Flexibility (33:19–35:46):

  • Learned from Arc’s architectural mistakes—Dia is fast, performant, and prototyping-friendly.
  • “If the strategy was a mass market browser people would use irrespective of the AI features, then it had to be fast…and a really good browser.” (34:13, Hirsch)
  • Used Swift’s concurrency model and custom architecture to achieve both speed and product iteration.

• Design Principle: The Browser is ‘Enabling Tech’—the Main Event is the Personal Intelligence Layer (36:58–39:41):

  • Inspired by the “Internet Computer” vision: an intelligence that sits across all devices, enabling new interactions.

  • "You’re not turning to it for the tabs, or even the desktop part. You’re turning to it for this personal intelligence layer." (38:51, Josh Miller)

7. Skills: A New Layer of “Just-in-Time” Personal Software

• Dia’s “Skills” Platform and Bottom-Up Use Cases (49:53–56:25):

  • Launching and opening up a “skills” layer (mini, AI-driven apps, extensible by users).
  • Surprised by how quickly people grasped the possibilities—creating unique and personal use cases (e.g., automatically fetching guitar chords from YouTube videos).
  • “AI enables a new class of software, where instead of building for a large TAM you build for hyper-personal, niche uses—just in time, as needed.” (56:00, Hirsch)

  “Non-technical people like me want to feel technical... You're inventing a new programming language.” (57:31, Josh Miller, quoting a message to his designer)

8. On Doubt, Resilience, and the Emotional Toll

• Year of Pain, Lessons of Perseverance (60:14–67:42):
  • The aftermath of pivoting from Arc was emotionally brutal: criticism from press, users, and even within the company.
  • Both founders deeply questioned themselves, struggled with employee morale, and weathered personal hardship (Hirsch had a newborn, Josh had two young kids).
  • The power of founder partnership and personal support systems came up again and again:

    “We both have funks and highs… We now know the signs to pull each other out." (63:58, Josh Miller)

  • Emotional resilience and, ultimately, validation:

    "Right now, I'm not this confident that Dia will be the next Chrome, but I know what me and Hirsch felt in our bones was correct." (65:29, Josh Miller)

9. Moats, Competition, and The Importance of “Vibes”

• How Do You Compete Now? (67:42–73:34):

  • The competitive landscape is heating up: perplexity, AI labs, tech giants entering the ‘AI browser’ space.
  • The founders believe traditional moats (distribution, engineering, IP) are shifting—or vanishing.
  • Their new philosophy:

    “It’s all noise… The answer is: we’re going to do our thing. My learning from the last years: when we do our thing, at least some people resonate with it. Vibes is the moat, and we'll figure out the rest." (70:40–71:00, Josh Miller, 71:08, Dan Shipper)

  • Emphasis on execution, product quality, taste, and “emotional intelligence” as differentiators—believing that most competitors are too engineering-driven and miss the personal, subjective, and even artistic experience that truly resonates.

• The Promise of Emotional and Social Intelligence (73:34–75:54):

  • “We're going back to this home on the internet… I’d be surprised if the other AI browsers have that as central as their north star." (73:34, Josh Miller)

10. Inspiration: Romanticism, Culture, and Personal Connection

• Product Design Through the Lens of Romanticism & History (77:04–84:15):
  • Josh and the team intentionally draw inspiration from outside tech—art, history, and especially the Romantic period as a counter to tech’s rationalism:

    “That’s the profound shift: this new relationship with technology and with this intelligence… I want to read about romanticism. I want to understand how in the past, when your relationship with technology changed, how did art and culture react?” (77:04, Josh Miller)

  • LLM-powered software as “vibes-based” and more like artistic material than algorithmic machinery; you can’t fully explain or reduce it to rules.
  • AI as a profound new medium that’s as much about feeling as about function.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Memory, Context, and Unprecedented Shifts:

  "Memory... which is core to what we're doing now, I don't think was part of the conversation and now is arguably the most central idea behind Dia." (19:00, Josh Miller)

• On Platform Risk and Betting on the Future:

  "It was a real act of introspection to say, am I disconnected, or do I just see what other people don't because of what we're doing? And for me, it was this constant back and forth in my head." (21:10, Josh Miller)

• On Team, Trust, and Prototype-Centric Culture:

  "One of our saving graces is that we could just sort of frame it as what it was at the time: an inclination, a hunch." (23:12, Josh Miller)

• On Product Vision and Building for the Future:

  "It’s not about the browser; the browser is almost incidental… What you’re turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild invention of humanity." (38:51, Josh Miller)

• On Reinvention and Failure:

  “The combination of Hirsch and then my increasing conviction that this was going to change all of software, as bombastic as that sounded… But what happened next was indecision and a lack of excellent leadership, at least on my part.” (17:24, Josh Miller)

• On Emotional Toll:

  "This year, professionally, was by far the heaviest I felt in my body… constant doubt and ups and downs... never-ending." (62:51, Josh Miller)

• On Competition and Moats:

  “Vibes is the moat, and you'll figure out the rest, which…I actually love. I think that's totally right.” (71:08, Dan Shipper) “I just feel like we have a clarity of thought and perspective that feels unique. If we stay locked into being our most energetic selves, that's how we compete." (68:33, Josh Miller)

• On Personalization and a New Kind of Software:

  "AI enables a new class of software where we can build software that allows people to make their niche software just-in-time, whenever they need it." (56:00, Hirsch)

• On the Messy, Nonlinear Path of Innovation:

  “To me, when Abby kind of reminded me of [Romanticism], I just can’t unsee it.” (82:06, Josh Miller)

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Selected Segment Timestamps

| Timestamp | Segment | |---------------|-------------------------------------------------| | 00:00 – 05:15 | Opening: Reflection on Arc, the shift to Dia | | 05:15 – 10:04 | Why Arc’s early adopter appeal couldn’t scale | | 10:04 – 12:13 | The “spark” from LLMs and birth of Arc Search | | 14:36 – 17:07 | Rethinking browser as “intent funnel” | | 17:24 – 20:31 | Leadership, regret, and calling the pivot | | 23:09 – 25:05 | Team culture enables risk and adaptation | | 26:17 – 29:23 | Why not settle for millions? World-changing ambition | | 33:19 – 35:46 | Technical overhaul and product requirements | | 36:58 – 39:41 | The “Internet Computer” and personal AI vision | | 49:53 – 56:25 | Release, rapid skill innovation, surprise use cases | | 60:14 – 67:42 | Emotional reality of the “toughest year” | | 68:33 – 73:34 | Facing competition, shifting moats, importance of taste and “vibes”| | 77:04 – 84:15 | Philosophical foundation—romanticism, culture, AI as art/material |

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Episode Takeaways

• True platform shifts require courage to walk away from success as well as failure.
• Prototypes beat PowerPoints—most vision can only be made clear by building.
• In the AI age, software moats may favor culture, speed, taste, and “vibes” over distribution or mere technical execution.
• LLMs allow software to become deeply personal, subjective, and open to “mini” creative expression by its users.
• Resilience, strong teams, and support matter as much as vision—the emotional toll is real.
• Great product teams in tech should look for inspiration as seriously in the humanities as in engineering.
• Big changes will seem crazy before they’re obvious. If you’re right, you’ll look crazy right up until you aren’t.

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Most Memorable Quote

"Vibes is the moat, and you'll figure out the rest."
— Dan Shipper & Josh Miller (71:08)

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This episode is a candid, inspiring narrative about the risks and rewards of ambitious product leadership in the AI era, packed with wisdom for founders, builders, and anyone interested in the future of how we interact with technology.

Transcript

[Josh Miller]

You're catching us. Two weeks after we really released DIA to this private beta. I don't think the first two weeks could have gone better. We feel so, so proud. And so I think I felt an adrenaline release. And I think it's safe to say last year sucked. Like it. It really did. We were running a company with 70 people, millions of people using the product every month. Now we're starting over. Oh, cool. What are we doing? We don't really know, but it'll be great.

[Hirsch]

We had this realization that all of software needs to be rewritten for this new world because primary interfaces we have with computers are going to change.

[Josh Miller]

What feels like your computer in five or 10 years is actually going to be this layer that sits across all of your devices. This is the Internet computer. But you're not turning to it for the tabs. You're not even turning to it for the desktop part. What you're turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild invention of humanity that's going to help you do all sorts of things, and it's going to be miraculous. But don't forget, the browser's just the enabling technology underneath.

[Dan Shipper]

Josh Hirsch, welcome to the show.

[Hirsch]

Good to be here.

[Josh Miller]

Thanks for having us. Of course.

[Dan Shipper]

So good to have you. So for people who don't know, you are the co founders of the browser company, you are the makers of ARK and now dia, and I'm psyched to talk to you about dia, talk to you about the journey to get there. As, as you can see if you're watching the show, me and Hirsch are together.

[Josh Miller]

We're.

[Dan Shipper]

We're in upstate New York in a little. In a little cabin. We've been friends for a long time. And I think one thing that people should know coming into this is like, we have been sort of like on parallel journeys together as you've started. The browser company started every around the same time as you guys started. And we've been close for a long time, so it's. It's been really fun to get to watch the journey from afar. And yeah, I'm just really excited to get to talk to you about it. So thanks for coming on.

[Josh Miller]

Well, I'm just going to say for the record, I'm not there because I didn't get the invite, so we're not that close. Dan. I'll say. I'm kidding. No, it's awesome to be here.

[Dan Shipper]

I didn't organize. You got to blame Paulina, Hirsch's wife.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah.

[Hirsch]

Honored to be here. Excited to do this. We've listened to so many of your podcasts, and obviously we have so much history.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, yeah. So another. A couple other disclaimers. I'm a small investor in the browser company, so people should know that I also spoke at your wedding, so we'll. We'll put up a little picture of me speaking there. And another, like, really interesting little bit of history that. That is fun for me to remember now is I actually, like, there was a point at which I was considering, or you guys were considering me to be the CEO of the browser company, which is crazy to think about that now because, you know, you would come up with the idea to. To incubate. At the time, it was superhuman for browsers, was the pitch, as I remember. And I was working on Super Organizers, which is a little newsletter which would become Every.

[Josh Miller]

Oh, did that turn into Every. I didn't even realize that was. Wow.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. And so there was. There was a moment in time where.

[Hirsch]

Where we were.

[Dan Shipper]

We were discussing working together on this. So it's really fun to come full circle five and a half years later and be like, wow, I'm. We're both. We're all so much older. We have so much. So many more wrinkles. I have a. I have a big beard. I think I was pretty clean shaven when. When we were doing that. So, yeah, that was a crazy moment.

[Josh Miller]

Last is Super Organizer, like, your arc.

[Hirsch]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, yeah.

[Josh Miller]

Well, I hope DIA goes as well as every. I've, like, fingers crossed. Like, I'm into it.

[Dan Shipper]

Thank you. I think we all have a lot to learn from each other, so I think the. The first thing I want to talk about is I watched this pivot from ARK to dia. I think we were in Thailand together when you were first starting to get, like, really psyched about AI. And I just watched Hirsch's eyes just, like, he had this, like, spark. It was like a sparkle. It was like, oh, my God, this is crazy. And I was like, yes. I was like the little devil on his shoulder being like, yes, you get it.

[Josh Miller]

Oh, it's your fault, Dan. I always wondered where that came from.

[Dan Shipper]

And. And what's. What's been really interesting to me to see is I. I've obviously been watching this journey from ARK to DIA and watched the decision happen to be like, yeah, okay, we're not going to do ARK anymore. And then watch the public reaction, which was so negative. I think people just loved ARK so much and then watched you guys have to, like, bear that while you were building diagnosis. And I just want to know, like, what was that like?

[Hirsch]

Honestly, it was a little unexpected. I don't think we had predicted the reaction that we got when we announced that, especially because we had been in this headspace for quite a while. You know, we'd been trying to, all throughout 2023 or so, trying to figure out how do we get from early adopters to the mass market with ark? And ARK had this problem, which we call the novelty tax, where there's so much new stuff in it, where. Which really attracted early adopters, but made a lot of the mass market sort of more hesitant to try ark because it just took a lot to get to learn and use. And so I don't. I mean, Josh can probably say more. We tried so many things to figure out, okay, how do we make ARC sort of approachable to the mass market? And then simultaneously, AI had been taking off. And I think Josh has this video. Last year of act two, we had this realization that actually, browsers are going to change pretty dramatically, and how we use computers are going to change pretty dramatically from a user computer interface point of view, you know, where we're going to talk to our computers, they're going to do stuff because this new Play DOH allows you to speak in English and they can use tools, and suddenly computers are something completely different. And so we went through our own evolution over many months to be like, how do we nudge ARC in that direction? And for a while we called it arc 2.0 and we were like, okay, how do we evolve it? And we just ran into a lot of problems internally, too, where we loved ARC so much that we were hesitant to change it. You know, like, the. The internal discussions about, like, oh, what do we do with the sidebar was like, at the wrong level. You know, when we have this new Play doh, we really had to start from. From scratch. And so maybe I, you know, I. I'm curious for your take, Josh, actually, on, like, how do you feel about the external messaging? Because for us, it was over such a long period of time and so obvious, you know, that we had to, okay, we have to start from scratch if we're going to build this thing from the ground up to use AI and to be accessible to the mass market. But I think it was probably a shock to the external folks that, oh, my God, we're building a whole new browser.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, I mean, I think. I think the thing I would say is you're catching us two weeks after we really released DIA to this private beta. And I'd say in terms of Hirsch and My hopes and expectations. I don't think the first two weeks could have gone better. We feel so, so proud. And so I think I felt an adrenaline release. And I think it's safe to say last year sucked like it. It really did. And I think it's one of those things, like many things that I. I think are most fulfilling and rewarding in life, that if you knew what you knew now, would you have done it? And yet, at the same time, in retrospect, it so obviously was the right call. But I think a thing for especially listeners to know. And you alluded to this. Hirsch and I. I've never made software really, without Hirsch. I met Hirsch when I was 20 years old. We both left university, barely knowing each other, to start a company together. I think flash forward over a decade now, if I'm being really honest, I think it felt so obvious to me and Hirsch intellectually, emotionally. The thing I think we both underappreciated was it's not just me and him anymore.

[Dan Shipper]

Right?

[Josh Miller]

I mean. I mean, we knew that, but at every moment that Hirsch and I looked across a proverbial table and said, hey, should we. Should we do this? Should we make this thing? It was me and him, right? And we. We. We share value. Like, we. It's just a different relationship. We were running a company with 70 people, you know, millions of people using the product every month, and we definitely, I think, underappreciated the public reaction. I mean, when we started this company, Dan, I. You know, when we. When we were trying to recruit you to be the CEO, one of the questions like, how do you get anyone to care about their desktop web browser? In fact, I've never even thought about my desktop web browser before, let alone have an opinion on it, was the. The. What we saw the most. So I think we were very surprised by the reaction, for sure. And what. It does some things differently. But then maybe more importantly, definitely more importantly is our team showing up to a company where at that point in the company's evolution, people came because they loved Ark themselves. They joined for Ark more than the browser company. Be like, hey, that thing we poured our hearts into for years, now we're starting over. Oh, cool. What are we doing? We don't really know, but it'll be great. We're just gonna go that way. Right? Sounds like a great plan. Right? You know, like, so. Oh, it was a. It was a winding journey, but very proud at this point.

[Dan Shipper]

That's. Yeah. Okay. This is. There's a lot here I really want to go into. Tell me about the initial moment where you guys were coming to the decision of like, oh, wow, there's something totally new here. And not only is ARK maybe not working in the way that we want it to, but, like, there's something new that we need to go play with that we can't even really describe what it is. Like, what. What was that like? Like, how did that whole thing come together?

[Josh Miller]

Yeah. And one of the things I think I want to be more forthright about here, I don't think we've really said publicly before, is I almost think blaming ARK is a scapegoat. Right. If. If, if really Hirsch originally, and then myself didn't get so inspired by this new material that are LLMs, we would not have pivoted ARC to something else. You know, it wasn't. It's. It's easy in retrospect, like, oh, it's growing. Literally the novelty tax. And I 100 agree with her that that is true. But our first instinct was actually just to make ARK better. So I, I really think the origin story here was that, like, you can't stop thinking about it. You're staying up till 3am every bone in your body is just like, this is why we got into software. But I. I really gotta credit Hirsch. I think I have this part of me that is very anti Silicon Valley hype. Which honestly, for people that follow me on Twitter or something, they're probably like, I think of you as like a hypey dude. And, and yeah, let's have a therapy session later about that. But for me, I just. The crypto wave was the one that came before and just for me, it just, it felt icky to me, even. Even though I agreed with idealism. So here comes around AI and my knee jerk reaction is like, this is a bunch of hot air. But really, like, when I think about. I didn't not thinking about this interview before we came in. You know, when you just said that with the origin story, I think of a conversation I had with Hirsch in San Francisco that to me was the like, oh, we gotta do this thing. So, I mean, Hirsch, when you. You really were first to see this world that was coming and feel it in your bones. Like, remember even for you, where it came from and when.

[Hirsch]

He's giving me a lot of credit. I think it was probably. I came at it from my own perspective. I think realizing part of it was excitement about the play. D'oh. But part of it also was the realization that, like, if. If we don't go this route, I Think, you know, we're going to get obviated. You know, all of software needs to be rewritten for this new world because, again, the. The primary interfaces we have with computers are going to change. But I think a lot of it also came from your experimentation with ARC Search, right. And like, actually playing with LLMs and realizing, oh, we can build something cool here. This is Plato we're really good at using.

[Josh Miller]

Ark was extremely popular amongst the kind of limited corner of the world that knew about it. And the number one request for ARC was, I need a mobile app. But the browser is very different on mobile than it is on desktop. So we said, okay, let's just build a companion app. You can have your spaces and your tabs on your phone. And I'll, you know, in the backdrop of launching this kind of ARC mobile app is when all these kind of AI tools started popping up. And there. As much as we wanted, or I wanted to resist the hype, I'm an intellectually curious guy that loves new technology. And so there was some part of me, especially driven by Hirsch, that was like, okay, but if you really just tried to make the best kind of AI browser experience you could, what would it look like? But it would have been a huge distraction for the team to do that on desktop. So we actually hired a contractor externally. I was living in Paris at the time and kind of hired him to the Skunk Works project. Was like, hey, just for funsies, it's not going to be a big deal. What if we build a mobile browser that only does one thing? Again, we had a little bit of the, like, PTSD from ARC already, but it only does one thing really well, and it has something to do with AI at its core, just to prototype and learn. And so the idea was, what if in this mobile browser, instead of pulling back links, we made you the perfect webpage? So instead of typing in a query and trying to find the right link from the World Wide Web, that is the closest approximation to what you're asking for, but not exactly what you're asking for. Let's understand the intent of your query and just make a web page on the fly for that thing. Just very simple idea. And it was so not a big deal or meant to be a big deal. I tweeted it on a Sunday before boarding a flight, which for our company, is not how you launch new products. And it just exploded more than anything we've made so far. And so, you know, we had a number of takeaways from, from that, but one of them that really influenced DIA was what Hersh is referencing as the novelty budget. Keep it extremely simple, extremely focused. Change one thing, and have that one thing be the thing you talk about, which I realize in retrospect is like, yeah, duh, welcome to, like, making consumer products for real human beings. But is the antithesis of ARC as, you know, in terms of the product philosophy.

[Hirsch]

I think ARC Search also gave us sort of a strategic realization, which is if you think about what a browser is, it has sort of a desktop browser especially. It has two components. One is it's sort of a funnel for intent. You know, the. The Omnibox is where you type in all your search queries, and if you have a certain intent, it goes to search, and then you can go find that thing. And secondly, it's an application platform, and so you run all your web apps in it. Sort of the web 1.0 and 2.0 sort of portions of what a browser does. And both, I think ARC Search made us realize that the intent portion is going to be drastically changed by AI, because a lot of our intent is going to go to these models that get a bunch of data and then, you know, spit out the actual answer. And because AI can use tools to. And the browser has access to all your apps, it can also really support the application component. And so I think ARC Search was our first foray into realizing browsers are going to change, you know, and so we need to rethink what our strategy is, because the entire ecosystem has changed, and the browser's place in that ecosystem is going to change drastically. And so that was sort of our first moment of like, oh, we got to rethink, you know, what this product is.

[Josh Miller]

And I think the bit about search is really key here that came to influence Diaz. You know, keep in mind, our kind of approach to building ARC was really as much about, you know, urban planning and interior design as software. And that our recognition was, you spend hours a day in this rectangle in the space, and people don't have any feelings about it. Could we change that? And so the sort of conversations we had is like, okay, can we enumerate where those minutes and hours are spent? And arguably, the core action in a browser is and was search. But up until ARC Search, we sort of said, you can't touch that. You know, we're not Google, even though search opening a new. I mean, the command T text box is the most popular text box on your desktop computer, according to Apple, and I'm sure Microsoft as well. But we kind of said, no, we're not a search company. We couldn't possibly do anything with that. You know, that's Google's domain. Look, even Microsoft, through tens of billions over many years and Bing sucks. So what are we going to do? So I think it also opened Pandora's box of saying, oh wait, as Hirsch said, this is, this is the choke point for the Internet. This little box routes you to places and does that mean we can now route you to new places and new things? So that was also the big like eye opening moment from Arc Search, which was not the intention at all at the time we started the project.

[Dan Shipper]

So, so take me from that moment from like, okay, you make some realizations around Arc Search to probably, okay, we're going to do R 2.0, but actually maybe this is a totally new product. Like what happened in between there?

[Josh Miller]

I've never said this before. I think indecision and a lack of, you know, excellent leadership on at least I'll say my part in that. I think Hirsch and I knew deep down in that moment what we had to do. Whether it was from the Arc perspective of like Ark Search feel so simple and clean and resonant with people. I mean that was the first time we had people telling us like, hey, I, I really don't like Ark on desktop. Sorry, I just like too much, don't get it. But I love Arc Search. So I think the combination of Hirsch and then my kind of increasing conviction that this was going to change all of software, as bombastic as that sounded, combined with the bottoms up resonance and simplicity and focus of Arc Search, Hirsch and I, I think in our heart of hearts, knew what we had to do. But what happened next was that was in probably February of last year and it was in June at a company wide off site that we said we're going to build something new. But then even then it was like, it's going to be arc 2.0, like we don't even know, like TBD. So I think it probably wasn't until September ish of last year that we made the call to say it is a completely new product called something completely different with no connectivity to ark. And you know, I, I am so proud of actually a lot of what Hersh and I have done over the past year or two as leaders, especially in this moment. But I'd say that period is the one that I regret the most in terms of just like not calling a spade a spade and just like ripping the cord, you know.

[Hirsch]

And to our point earlier, especially with a team that large and A team that joined post product market fit, you know, like getting the team's buy in and get aligning with everybody and figuring out what are we doing and it took a little while.

[Josh Miller]

Dan, One thing I'll add too is like, you know I, I love every of my favorite publications. Not an investor wishes, wish I was an investor. But it's, it's fantastic. And one of the things that is remarkable actually even reading your coverage is keep in mind where AI was 14 months ago. You know, it was, you know, ChatGPT was, you know, long in the market and I think for most people paying attention you could kind of pull the curve forward. But there was also a lot of technology macro risk at the time as well, which is like, are the scaling laws really going to continue? Like are we going to figure out hallucinations? You know, even this concept of memory which is core to what we're doing. I, I mean I can't remember the timestamps, but I don't think was part of the conversation and now is like arguably the most central idea behind dia. And so yeah, it's easy in retrospect I think to be a little like, you know, self deprecating and it was not obvious definitely to everybody or anyone. And I do remember we put out a video that was like, we think AI browsers are the future. And everyone's like, what are you talking about? Like, like you're being a hype boy, what are you talking about? And you know, literally today there is a, you know, MG Siegler last night wrote this whole article that's like, yeah, AI browsers are definitely going to be a thing and everyone's definitely going to build them. Like Apple's going to make one, OpenAI is going to make one. And so I don't say that's a gloat, it's actually, you know, competition that we have to wrestle with. But in the moment at which I'm like, oh, the indecision. There were so many reasons why you would not do what we did. So it was not that clear.

[Dan Shipper]

I totally, I totally remember all of those things, like how if you're really using those tools every day, you're like, wow, there's something here. But if, if you weren't, you were like, this stuff is like not good. No serious person could ever use this for their work. And that has completely shifted, at least for, for a lot of people over the last like 18 months and I.

[Josh Miller]

Would even say six months. Dan. Like one of the things that I remember in the moment was Again, it's almost like it sounds like a love story or a relationship. Like me and Hersch in quiet moments together and the conversations we would have.

[Dan Shipper]

About this candlelit, you know.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, like looking each other's eyes glistening about our future intelligence or whatever. But keep in mind, like, I. Hersch and I are both people that, you know, really care about the people in our lives outside of work and put a lot of effort into those relationships. I'm really close with my family, and the people in my life in that moment were not into the idea of AI. You know, keep in mind the discourse that was. That was peak. This thing's going to ruin humanity and it's stealing artistic works and all that stuff, which I'm not saying doesn't have merit, but you go to the dinner table, you know, with my family showing a demo of this ChatGPT thing that I'm staying up till 3am and just finding deep inspiration in, and they're like, what are you talking about? And so that's just like another moment where you're like, okay, the story of Arc at that point was great. You made a great product for tech people. Anyone that's in the software industry loves what you did, or at least respects it. But your problem is you didn't build something fundamentally mass market and essential for everyone that uses their laptop. And so to the extent we were going to build a new product, it was only if we thought we could achieve our original mission of changing the way the average laptop person uses the Internet. And in a moment where the dinner table conversations with the people we deeply love and care about, we're often saying, you are too, in the tech world, man. You're telling me that, like, the thing that comes after Ark is this, like, AI nonsense that's spitting out gibberish. So it's a real act of, like, introspection to say, am I. Have I lost it? Have I become disconnected? Or are we. Do we just see what other people don't see because of what we're doing? And at least for me, was this constant back and forth in my own head and with Hirsch of, like, what is reality? I don't know.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, yeah.

[Hirsch]

I mean, not only from our friends, but also employees, you know, so that was. That was tough.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. What was that like when you had that company meeting and you're like, hey, this is a new product.

[Hirsch]

Do you remember Josh? Was that at the off site?

[Josh Miller]

Yeah. I will say, since narratives get kind of added, in retrospect, it really was more of a gradual evolution. So There were some key moments. There was this off site in Montreal where we definitively said, we're at least going to try to build the second product, whether or not it's arc 2.0 or not. There was a moment when we said, it is going to be a second thing, but it was obviously more gradual. I think one of the saving graces, and I do not think we could have done this with a different company in a different moment, was that, you know, really, to Hersh's credit, we founded this company with some core values that we really live by. And one of them is assume you don't know. So we have this culture of no one has any idea what they're talking about and we'll have no idea until we try it. Right? And so that's why we have such a prototype driven culture, experimental culture, for better, for good and bad reasons. And so I think in general at the browser company, if anyone says, I got this wacky idea and I'm really excited about it, I'm not, you know, let's try it. The people's first reaction is like, cool, prototype it and let's talk about it after that. And so I think that was one of our saving graces, is that we could just sort of frame it as what it was at the time, an inclination, a hunch. And again, I think as you built more and more things, I think became clear to more and more people over time. And I also think we just built up a lot of trust right at that point. We'd been building ARK for a number of years. People loved it. People joined the company because they loved it. And I think, you know, we had added some trust points to her bank account and Hirsch and I drew them down to maybe a negative balance, you know, up until DIA got further along. But, you know, credit to the team, you know, it's not like there was an organ rejection. There were people that had their own concerns and anxieties, as is normal. It was a, a big call that was existential for the company, but in general, we had this culture of like, all right, let's see, you know.

[Hirsch]

Yeah. And one thing I'll add is we also built the capabilities over time. So as we were prototyping, we were getting a better sense of, like, both where the value is here, but also like, what are the things we need to get better at? Like, eval's functioning, you know, from a technical perspective, from a design perspective, how, like, how do chat interfaces work? Our chat interfaces, the right mechanism, alarms, all of that. And so Again, as we gradually built that capability, our confidence grew.

[Dan Shipper]

What do you say to people? Because I think this is probably on someone's mind if they're listening to this. And it certainly was like, it was a thing I was thinking, which is, okay, I totally understand that maybe it's not going to be like this gigantic ARC is just not going to be this gigantic mass market consumer product or whatever, but, like, it had millions of users. Yeah, that's pretty good. And is isn't like VC distorting your, like, what you count as good? And aren't you kind of like killing something that so many people love just because you. It's not like billions of users? And like, talk to me about that because, yeah, I want to understand how you think about it.

[Josh Miller]

Well, Dan, actually it relates to the origin story when we asked you to be the CEO. So the origin of the browser company was I was working at a venture capital firm and I was just shocked that all of the coolest, fastest growing Silicon Valley companies that were coming across our desks were all of a sudden desktop web apps. And they're desktop web apps for work. I mean, you started a newsletter called Super Organizers. This was the moment of productivity software, right. And so the idea was like, let's make a enterprise browser for work. And as you said, take the superhuman, the notion, the Figma Playbook, and run it. And so Hirsch was going to be the founder and we were looking for a co founder CEO. And the first, he's like, I had to call Dan. He's my best friend. He does this newsletter called Super Organizers. It's perfect. And maybe it would have been perfect, maybe we'd be having a different PODC podcast about how wildly profitable Ark is. But the reason I say that is because the reason I ended up joining the browser company CEO, in addition to really just wanting to work with Hirsch again, was this aha moment that actually the browser is arguably the most consumer piece of software in the world. Like, there are very few pieces of software that your mom and your second cousin and your partner all use. Like 4 billion people use Chrome every month and nobody cares about it. And most people don't have like a second browser for Netflix and shopping. And so if you care about what I personally have always cared the most about, which is how we as a society broadly use technology, then the motivation for me, and I think the origins of the company, was to build something at that level of ambition, even if that's not the idea that we pitched to you initially. And so that was never part of the calculation. Honestly, for me and Hirsch, when we talked about like, oh, do we want to build a product with millions of people? We. I would have. We would have capitalized this company completely differently if that was the goal. We would have done so many things differently. So I think the idea of, like, why wouldn't you be okay with a, you know, couple million people browser that, you know, makes decent money just comes back to why I personally got into software and what motivates me and Hirsch. So I will say, hopefully, you know, people have heard there are a lot of things that were hard, there are a lot of things that were unclear. The why are we here? Why did we start this company? Has been consistent and unwavering from our perspective.

[Hirsch]

I also, like, again, we're sort of fixating on Ark, but the reason for this was, was not just what do we do with Ark and how do we grow it? It was also how do we meet this moment? You know, and like, we were just so inspired by, oh my God, like, it's this platform shift is happening and what software is and can be, is. Can be so different and so much more capable and look very different. And we have a specific skill set and team that's capable of building that interface future. And so I think part of it was also just a deep inspiration for what's possible. And again, we didn't start with the idea. We would start from scratch. We started with this idea, we would evolve, arc in that direction. And then that ended up being much more difficult than we thought. And so we started with Diagnosis.

[Josh Miller]

And I also think as her shed, it's like as the technology was evolving, as we were getting more familiar with it, it was getting more clear to other people what was valuable about it and where the points of leverage were. We also started to realize that the browser layer was going to be very central. You know, at first it was sort of like, wait, we don't want to be that company. That's just because we got inspired doesn't mean you should pivot your company, right? They're inspiring things I see all the time. I'm not like, hey, let's go start like an indie film company, right? So the thing that really did it was okay. It feels really disconnected from everything I'm doing every day. I'm spending a lot of time copy and pasting and context switching and exporting tabs as PDFs and weird stuff like that. So being able to meet people where they are again, the idea of memory and context, like, people didn't say context Was king a year ago. Maybe you did, but most people did. Yeah, there you go. This is why you got to subscribe to every. You would have been a year early, but, you know, starting to realize that, okay, the more that you tell these models, the more useful and personal they get. And I'm spending hours a day in this thing. And then, as Hersh said, too, hey, we don't know anything about agents. This is sort of out of our wheelhouse at the time at which was coming up. But it seems like the big promise is they're going to do some things and tools for you. But wait a minute. That's not useful unless they're your tools with your authentication and we have your cookies. So it was also, again, to Hersh's point of inspiration, realizing that structurally and honestly felt like we had, like, you know, been at the end of the rainbow before the rainbow came, and all of a sudden, like, a pot of gold appeared. And so it was sort of like, all right, I feel like we should probably try to open this pot. Like, this feels like the thing to do, you know?

[Dan Shipper]

Well, let's. Let's talk about what you found when you opened the pot. Like, you guys made dia. And I will say, and I think this is. This is an interesting testimonial given my. My relationship to both of you. And my relationship as an investor is like, I. I was always an ARC user, but it was never my default browser. Safari was always my default browser, and DIA is now my default browser. I switched from Safari. Hey, which, like. And. And that's not. Like, I love both of you, but, like, a browser is too personal for me to switch my browser because I like you.

[Josh Miller]

Clearly, Dan.

[Dan Shipper]

So this is. This is totally not for podcast purposes or anything like that. Like, I just switched to it because I think the. And this is maybe gets to your point. One of your points about ARC is, like, I used ARC for certain, like, heavy research tasks and for podcasting specifically, because, like, Riverside doesn't work in Safari. You have to use a Chromium browser. And I'd rather use ARC than Chrome, but Safari is so lightweight and fast, and ARC was never like that. And DIA is so fast. And I was like, this is really good. And then it has the AI stuff in it, which. It opens up a whole new way of using web pages for me that I really love. So it's like, it's coming. It's definitely. I think a lot of what you're saying is coming through for me, and it's been really cool to see IT get launched and get the reception it's gotten. This episode is brought to you by Addio, the AI native CRM built for the next era of companies with Addeo. Setup takes minutes. Connect your email and calendar and it instantly builds a CRM that mirrors your business with every contact enriched and organized from the start. From there, Addeo's AI goes to work. It gives you real time intelligence during calls, IT prospects leads with research agents, and it automates your team's most complex workflows. Industry leaders like Union Square Ventures, Flatfile and Modal are already building the future of customer relationships on addio. Go to add IO.comevery and get 15% off your first year. That's a T T I O.com every and now back to the show.

[Josh Miller]

Well, Hersh is honestly, it's worth talking about the architectural decisions because that was a whole nother thing. We decided to just be like, why don't we do this completely differently too while we're at it?

[Hirsch]

Yeah, we really had a. So ARC was really built around how do we prototype as fast as possible. And we made some shortcuts in the architecture to enable that, which had some performance impact.

[Dan Shipper]

Interesting.

[Hirsch]

And so we, we were really optimizing for how do we prototype and build new features and in a way that we can do them quickly.

[Dan Shipper]

And what was the. Just quickly.

[Hirsch]

What was the architecture? It used a kind of Redux type state driven architecture, which is a little crazy for a desktop app, but allowed us to move really quickly. Over time it became really complex to manage, which was an issue. But also performance was a big concern.

[Dan Shipper]

And Redux is like the meta, like React framework or way of thinking about how to pass information from a UI layer to.

[Hirsch]

Exactly.

[Dan Shipper]

To the back to the server and all that kind of stuff.

[Hirsch]

Exactly, exactly. And so, you know, we had a real choice last summer on when we were building dia. Do we build it on the same architecture or do we build something new? That's really fast. And I think part of the, I mean certainly the engineering team was really excited about an architecture that we were excited about that fixed a lot of performance problems that DIA that ARC had. But also it was core to the strategy. You know, if the strategy was a mass market browser that people would ideally use irrespective of the AI features, then it had to be fast and it had to be, you know, just be a really, really good browser.

[Dan Shipper]

What did you figure out about how to make something performant?

[Hirsch]

I honestly, a lot of it has been swift. Swift has this new structured concurrency mechanism that allows you to just move a lot of stuff off the main thread. So just leaning really heavily into that has been helpful. And then shout out to some of our incredible architects, Max and Adam, who built this entirely new architecture that allows us to move faster than arc, but also deals with a lot of the performance problems. So.

[Dan Shipper]

Oh, so you figured out a way to still do prototyping quickly?

[Hirsch]

Yes, yeah, exactly.

[Josh Miller]

And the reason I think it's relevant is one of the ways I think we got the team really on board is we sort of went to a bunch of our best, most creative people and said, hey, you get a blank page too. So, you know, this had been a topic that's. These architectural challenges and latency, these have been themes. We talked forever. So we just sort of went person to person and said, hey, start over. You gotta do your most ab, be your most abundant self, dream. Come on. What are the things that you always regret? This is the moment to do, like, you know, so I will say, once the ball started rolling, people were able to find their kind of corners and pockets of what we were trying to do to either fix mistakes we made with Ark or do that thing they always wanted to do. You know, you can. You can feel it in dia. There are parts of it that there. I hope there's some kernels of the browser company that are consistent across it, but there are also some things I think you can feel a group of people that said, no, we're really going to flex on this one and we're not going to flex on this one in a way that's like ARC coded, but in a way that is what this should be right now. So I think you can feel that intentionality personally in the product relative to arc.

[Hirsch]

And one discussion we had when we were building this out also was, it's funny seeing Angie Siegler's post now about how AI browser are going to take off and we're sort of kicking off this race. But that was a discussion we had about the architecture, which is like, we have so much conviction in this route that when we launch this, if we are the first ones, we're going to kick off a race. And so how do we build an architecture from the ground up that allows us to move quickly in that race by the time we launch this? And so that was a lot of the input as well.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, Hirsch and I had a very seminal conversation for us, at least on that San Francisco trip I mentioned. And Hirsch flew out the next day before me and sent me this long, long essay in a Way that, you know, I don't get long, long essays from Hirsch, you know. And one of the things that Hirsch had the foresight to see in this new world was that it's not about the browser. The browser is almost incidental. Right? The real opportunity, and I think the language Hirsch used at the time was this truly personal assistant. I think all of us right now are grasping for what the right nouns are for the work that we're doing. But Hersh had the foresight to say, hey, it's not really about the browser part that is necessary, but that's not what the, where the value is going to come from. That's what's going to enable the thing you're turning to it for. Almost like the iPhone isn't really a cell phone. I mean, it is and you get that utility out of it, but that's not why the iPhone is so powerful. And I think in the moment for me, I was like, seems a little far fetched, but hope he's right. And as time has gone on, I think his, his, his instincts were, in retrospect, absolutely correct. The original Vision video we put out for Ark talked about this idea of an Internet computer. And we very much said we have no idea what that means. But based on the trend lines in our industry, it seems absolutely certain that what feels like your computer in five or 10 years is actually going to be this layer that sits across all of your devices of all shapes and sizes, because all of your apps and files are on the web now. And so I didn't really connect it at the time, but what Hirsch was saying was essentially, this is the Internet computer. You're going to have desktop browsers and mobile apps and all sorts of things. And on top of it is going to be this personal assistant or this intelligence for you. And it's going to benefit from the fact that it can intercept your queries on the new tab page and that it sees the docs you're writing in your browser tabs and it remembers the things you did last week. But you're not turning to it for the tabs, you're not even turning to it for the desktop part. What you're turning to it for is this personal intelligence layer that is a wild invention of humanity that's going to help you do all sorts of things and it's going to be miraculous. But don't forget the browser's just the enabling technology underneath. It's not the main event. So you can imagine how getting in front of the browser company of New York's employees, makers of a popular web browser called ARC that helps you with tab management in novel ways. Couldn't really nail that messaging in the moment. But in retrospect, I think that long email her sent me was extremely prescient regardless of if we win this race, if it's even zero sum. But he had the foresight of connecting it to the Internet computer idea that kind of underpinned arc. That's.

[Dan Shipper]

That's a couple things that I think are interesting here about like, lessons that it seems like you guys have learned about building the future. And, and some things that I've definitely seen at every, like, trying to do the same thing is one, when GPT3 was first a thing, everyone was like, this is going to be an incumbent enabling technology like Google and Microsoft. They're just going to like put a chat bo. Put a chat box on the, on the right side of Chrome and like, they're going to put it in Google Docs and like, everything is just going to be like for the incumbents. And I think one of the things you were saying earlier is just getting to go to people at ARC and be. Or people at the browser company and be like, you have a blank page. The. The level of creativity that you get there is so high and the level of power that you get is so high that it's actually, I think, impossible for most incumbents unless they're starting from scratch, which is really hard to do to just like slap AI onto this and actually that layer that you're talking about. And another thing that I think is really interesting that I've definitely found as both a builder and a writer, is it can be really hard to pitch the future, to talk about the future in a way that anyone understands. You have to build it, you have to like, prototype it, you have to like, feel it and see it. And that's the only way that then you can talk about it in a way that people understand. And it sounds like that's sort of what you found is you had this sense that you could express, but any way you expressed it, everyone was like, you're crazy. But then once you started to actually like, prototype it, that's how you found a way to talk about it in a way that people can understand.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, and two stories actually that come to mind that are very relevant. So Hirsch and I, our first company was Aqua, hired by Facebook when we were, I don't know, 22 or something. And I'll never forget this. All internal RIP branch, RIP branch, RIP branch. For the real ones out there that remember, I will never forget this internal all hands at Facebook where Zuckerberg stood up and had this whole presentation about how in five years everything was going to be video, social media was going to be video. And I thought he was nuts. I was like, this disconnected billionaire. Does he know how slow it is to watch a video on your phone? And then like, even if you could fix the buffering issues, why would you pick a tiny little screen in your pocket? Like, what is he thinking? And in retrospect, that proclamation and honestly, others that he made, even if he didn't capitalize on it, he was right. You know, I remember five years later, it's like, yep, TikTok's definitely a thing. And so I think part of what Hirsch and I took from that experience in different ways and similar experiences, like, hey, if you're going to start a company, one of the. You mentioned Branch, me and Hersh's first company, the origin story was a hackathon prototype. And, and my takeaway from that and that experience was like, if you start a company based on a prototype, you don't have a kind of fundamental internal guidepost when inevitably your prototype's going to fail. And so the intention of the browser company, inspired by our experience with Branch observations of Zuckerberg at Facebook, was don't pretend like you have all the answers, but even just directionally, are you heading, you're in la, you're going on a road trip, you're going to New York or Miami. You may not know how you're going to get there, and you may hate Miami, and Miami might be. Not be as cool as you think, but pick a destination that is five, 10 years out and run towards it. And so the Internet computer idea was that for us and was pretty central, I think, to our ability then with DIA as well, to. To kind of just go for it.

[Dan Shipper]

What I think is interesting too, about that is just to just to push on it a little bit, because I think there's a thing that if you're a builder listening to this, you might take away that, I don't know is actually what you actually mean is that you can see the future in front of you and you're just going to go figure out how to build it. And yeah, you don't know the route, but like, you know, you're going to San Francisco or, you know, you're going to New York or whatever. But I think what's interesting about the Internet computer idea is what the Internet computer meant changed.

[Hirsch]

Yeah.

[Dan Shipper]

And so you're you're sort of. You have this broad sense that there's going to be a different way of interacting with computers and that you wanted to build that, but what you thought that was going to be is actually very different than the thing that you ended up building because you had no idea that AI was going to be such a thing when. When you started five and a half years ago. And I think that's really interesting, too. And that's definitely been consistent with my feeling about every. You know, like, when we were. When we were talking about super organizers, I was like, I want to build this newsletter, and then I'm going to, like, launch products to the newsletter. We're doing the same thing now, but it looks so different and. And why it works is so different because of AI. And I think that's a really interesting thing, is to watch that vision unfold and fill in the details of what that actually means as the world evolves and your product evolves and you learn new things.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, I think that that, that point applies to that video story that I told you where at the moment Zuckerberg was saying, you're going to share the same types of personal, vulnerable updates that you do today in video now. And while there's some of that, I remember I. The. The moment I made the connection back to what Zuckerberg said at the all hands and even realized that become a thing was I had the opportunity to meet Evan Spiegel from Snapchat. I think it was in like 2019. And I was like, all right, I got to ask him one question. So my question for him was like, what's one thing that's really inspiring you right now? And he told me about this app from China or called Tik Tok, which again, it was pretty popular at the time, but I hadn't really come across it. And I was like, oh, why is it inspiring? He's like, it made it so anyone can be a celebrity for a day. And I remember being confused by the description, but you can kind of see that he was right and kind of capturing what was unique about TikTok. That was very different than when Zuckerberg said that is not friends sharing intimate videos with each other in a newsfeed. And so the point of being able to say where the world is going directionally is definitely not, you know, the details, but it's still, I think, you know, really important and it's tricky. One of the things, especially in our media cycle is, you know, we built Ark in public, but we also built it with prototypes and, you know, sharing everything. And so when we share the Internet, computer, video, I honestly remember people internally being like, man, this seems kind of like, why are we adding this branding? What exactly does it mean? But at least we had built a little bit of trust to say for people to say like, okay, I like the things they're putting out. So I don't know, maybe they know it at the time. With dia, it was even more of a kind of high conviction bet on where the future was going. But we did not have an audience that wanted any proclamations from us about AI and again, ourselves sort of question, like, you know, were we right? And so one of the interesting things about DIA was there was a larger disconnect developing it than ark between the internal feelings and beliefs that we had and, like, what we could say publicly. And so that was also kind of an interesting part of building DIA versus versus ark.

[Hirsch]

What made it trickier also was because we bet on the scaling laws and the curves, and so a lot of our conviction wasn't even possible last year.

[Josh Miller]

You know, and so, oh yeah, GPT4O made DIA work. Like, when we started working on DIA, I might get my dates slightly off, but I distinctly remember messaging our person at OpenAI and being like, this model made our thing happen.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah, it's crazy. Like, we. We've had that same thing where you're. You're working on something, you're trying to build something, it's not working. You're doing all this prompting, you're doing all this, like, architecting to, like, spring string different models. And then we had this happen with autopus4 recently. Like, it just worked. And it was like, okay, we can throw out three months of work because now it just, like, it's just one shots. It.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, I mean, I really. A really a great example of that from DIA is, you know, to me, the core idea of DIA is this idea that it should get better with every tab you open. Just like every time you swipe a video in TikTok, it feels like it's getting to know you and it's more useful to you. That's how DIA should get, feel and get better with age. And Hirsch had the foresight to know that context and memory and personalization were going to be the thing that ended up differentiating. When all of the models and intelligence commoditized or looked that way, it was going to be the thing was the most personal. So Hirsch and a team worked on memory for nine months, and at some point we killed the project. We just tossed it away we're like, guess it's not gonna have memory. And then six weeks before launch it was like, wait a minute. I think the fact that had this context window over here, like, no, no, let's try this approach. Let's do memory one more time. And oh my God, that was a thing to deal with internally. That project that we just tossed away after nine months having this high, like top down conviction. Like we're gonna do it again right before this big launch. We've been working for, for a year. And again, I don't want to say it's work because it's too early, but like, it's looking pretty prescient again from Hirsch, but. But again, that was enabled by. In a span of six months, the fundamental building blocks changed enough and our understanding of how to wield them that a thing that we smart people banged against for nine months didn't happen, and then it happened pretty much overnight and.

[Hirsch]

Cost and latency and yeah, all that stuff.

[Dan Shipper]

Tell me about. Yeah, you've gotten it out in the wild. You have this thesis that it's going to get better with every tab you open, which I love. I think that's such a cle way. That's such a Josh, like Josh ism, like perfect. I love it means a lot coming from you. What are people using it for that has surprised your or, you know, what have you, what have you learned getting it out in the wild that you didn't know?

[Hirsch]

Curious for your take, Josh?

[Josh Miller]

I think I am surprised that people see what we see as quickly as they did. I thought this was going to be a really painful moment for us and I prepped and Hersh and I prepped the team for that. Hey, it's going to be a somewhat tricky, brutal summer because DIA is so basic. Because again, keep in mind the idea of DIA is not the browser bit, it's not the tab management, it's not the things you can see. It's all of these capabilities that Hirsch and the team have built under the hood. They were like, oh, if we just like then piece them together, we can build this application platform for AI that. But that wasn't what we released two weeks ago. You know, we released the building blocks under the hood, but the hood was pretty basic and we thought it was useful, but we thought it was going to just get trolled.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. I kept asking Hirsch for access and he was like, like later, like soon, soon.

[Hirsch]

And he didn't need outfit. For what it's worth, we got absolutely trapped.

[Josh Miller]

My friends and family were so Nervous about me because my style of. Of friendship and working on what I do is I enthusiastically want them on early in their feedback admission. My wife, who I've been with for, you know, over a decade, didn't try DIA until launch.

[Dan Shipper]

That makes me feel so much better.

[Josh Miller]

Because I was like, Hersh is just.

[Dan Shipper]

Like, I don't know what's going on, but like, are we growing apart?

[Josh Miller]

And that shows you. I actually felt like an artist. Not in terms of an artist in terms of our, you know, quality or. But just like the nerves to put this, like, personal work on the. So the biggest surprises people got it right away despite in its biggest in its current state, in terms of what it's useful for.

[Dan Shipper]

What do you think they get?

[Josh Miller]

I think MG's post really captures it, which is you can sort of feel the new latent possibilities underneath the surface by fusing these things together. Like, really what Hirsch and the team did is they broke apart the browser and they rebuilt it, put the pieces back together with models in every core part. And so you can't visually see that. But as you start using the product like this morning, actually I saw someone shared that they're. They clearly been using DIA for a couple weeks. So people like discover like these little Easter eggs, like, oh, I can do this. And what they found is when they look up songs on YouTube, they can ask it for the tab chords so they can play it on their guitar.

[Dan Shipper]

That's sick. I want you to use that. I. I actually do this all the time where I like send YouTube videos to Gemini and then have it tell like that transcribe the piano. So I'm gonna have to.

[Josh Miller]

I'm that and so I think people finding the like, it's subtle, but it's so much more convenient and so much more powerful to do it when the 1 plus 1 equals 3. The big surprise on the product side was sort of that observation taken to its extreme, which you would never put. Hey, you know what you can do in DIA on our website, you can look up the tab chords for the guitar when you're watching a video on YouTube. It's so personal. It's so the TAM of that is tiny. And a couple weeks before launch because big vision for DIA is that actually it's this kind of application platform that people will build things on top of. Was like, we should gesture at that just a little bit. Right? So let's. We have this concept of skills which are effectively AI apps. We have a couple that are first party, but they're really basic, just for.

[Dan Shipper]

People who are listening that, that haven't used it. Like, what is a skill in dia?

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, a skill in DIA is the equivalent of an. Or we hope will be the equivalent of an application on an iPhone or on a computer. But in this kind of AI world, what it is is it's a system prompt, a model or number of models, tool use and stringing those things together to do something for you. So someone might make a skill that is my job is to do sales and I look at leads on the Internet every day and when I see a lead, I have to look up X information about them and extract Y information and consider Z framework. And they kind of put that logic and framework and tool use into a skill to kind of aid them in what they do every day. But in the current version of the product that we released, the platform is still extremely limited. And so we weren't going to let anyone make their own because we were waiting until later this summer when we could actually expose those, the really cool building blocks, reasoning models, memory and the like. But we're like, okay, we got a gesture at it because that's why we're here. We were this big internal memo about the app strategy. And so we expose the ability to make the most basic custom skills possible that are basically just little prompts and.

[Hirsch]

Added a week before launch.

[Josh Miller]

It has exploded in terms of what people are doing and is now essentially the whole company is just building out the skills platform now. And the reason that that relates to the tab cord example is that one of the things we used to say with ARC was that, you know, no one cares about their browser, but they spend hours a day in it. It should feel like you're home on the Internet. Why do we all live in these like drab hotel rooms online where all of ours look the same, run by Google. It should feel as cozy as this background you're in right now. And you're seeing that principle play out, whether it's the first party features like chatting with your tabs and people finding use cases that are new and very personal to them, to people be like, wait a minute, you're saying I can make my own one of these that like when I'm doing my workflow for my job, can do exactly what I want it to do. It's almost like the normie. And I'm saying that for myself, I'm a sociology major that doesn't know how to code. Like everyone's looking around and seeing cursor and replit and lovable and these companies just Expl. Wow, you can make new things. And they're people like me being like, wait, I want to make new things. And I think we're tapping into something there of like, almost like handmade software, like people wanting to make things for themselves, like me, that I literally had to hound her shit at a hackathon in New York when I was 20 and beg him to make something with me because it was the only way I could express my ideas and software was to hope that someone like Hirsch would, like, want to make something with me. And so I think. I think it's starting to tap into that nerve. And while that observation is old, did not expect that this early in the product development, since we felt like that was like, to come and to be revealed.

[Hirsch]

This was an amazing insight by Josh, actually, that AI enables sort of a new class of software where rather than us thinking about what is software, we can create that is useful for a large tam. Instead, we can build software that allows people to make their niche software just in time, you know, whenever they need it. And so it's just a different way of thinking about what software can be. And that's because of AI.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah. I think there's a couple of other examples of, I mean, ChatGPT is maybe a good example where Excel is a good example, maybe notion, where it's not one big use case, it's not one job to be done, it's like millions of tiny little ones, which makes it a little bit less like a traditional, even like SaaS product, where you're like, well, we solved this particular problem for a user and a little bit more like creating a language where you're creating building blocks and then anyone can use the words in the language to express whatever they want in whatever situation they have, have. And that's like A, a uniquely powerful type of product, and also B, it's a uniquely challenging type of product because getting that language right and then communicating it to people that you can speak in this language is really hard.

[Hirsch]

Yeah. And I. I think we're particularly excited about it, A, because we love human computer interaction problems and design problems, and B, the browser just knows so much about you.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Hirsch]

It's such a personal piece of software. And if we're building this memory system and it's getting more and more personalized to you, it can. Can help you with that.

[Dan Shipper]

Yeah.

[Josh Miller]

Dan, it's funny you say that. I'm looking at my phone because late last night, Dustin, our head of design, the, the basically he was so inspired by these custom skills being created Dustin's an extremely humble, soft spoken Canadian. He doesn't do things. He turned to me a week ago, he's like, Josh, I need a week alone to prototype. I know what to do. And that sounds like something I would say. That's not something that Dustin says. So when he said that, I was like, yeah, okay, cool, go. And he texted me last night about what he's been prototyping and kind of showed me. And I sent him a text back. I said, actually I would have written it differently if I knew it was gonna be a podcast. But Dustin, you're legit inventing a new programming language. Non technical people like me want to feel technical. I aspire to know Swift. I don't give me a language to learn. And I don't mean language like complicated. Anyways, it keeps going. But, but. So I guess that's the surprise. The idea that AI and the power of it is when it's going to be extremely personal to you with very minimal work was the idea of DIA and this idea that actually the applications or agents, whatever we call them, but the tools that sit on top of the base are going to be more powerful than the base itself. That was consistent. The idea, it's going to be skills and it's going to be really jump to kind of the third party, not first party. And it's going to actually require this kind of new programming language thing. It's not programming like, it's kind of like the Internet computer. We struggle with the words, but the sensation is so obvious, which goes back to what we've said before. It's like one of those moments again where it's like, okay, entire company, we're going that way a hundred percent. Come on a podcast. Like, what, what is the skill? What are you talking about? Is. It's like, I don't know if the listeners are like, what are they like? These guys are crazy. But like in my bones right now, it's like that is so clearly where the world's going. So like, let's try our best to run that way.

[Hirsch]

And I will say we thought this was six or 12 months away, a while away. And because of this launch and just with the incredibly basic version we have in there and how people are using it, I think we've been inspired.

[Dan Shipper]

I want to get down into like, I think we've, we've traced the whole, for lack of a better word, arc of the company. So thus far, which is like, do arc, big success, but maybe not the kind of success that you guys were looking for announced that you're pivoting like a year of just pretty much hell was maybe getting punched in the face maybe a good description. And now you're like, we're back, baby. We're so back.

[Josh Miller]

There are a lot of problems too. But. Yeah. And.

[Dan Shipper]

I just want you guys to get as real as possible with me. As if there was no camera and no mic here, like the way that we would if we were just hanging out about. Yeah. What that. What that has been like. Like, I've watched you her, like, and sitting down with you, and you're like, there's like dark circles around your eyes and you're just like, like, what did I do? But. But even in that moment, being very like. But I know that this is right. But also, this sucks and I hate this. Yeah. Tell me about. Been like. Like, I've seen. I've seen a lot of the ups and downs. I've seen. I think people probably don't realize how much. For example, when you're pouring your life into something and everyone on Twitter and maybe people internally are like, you're making the absolute wrong decision. Yeah, you're. This is awful. Like, and on the flip side, now everyone's like, this is amazing. Like, what. What has that all been like?

[Josh Miller]

Like.

[Hirsch]

It'S tough. I think Josh said it best.

[Dan Shipper]

You.

[Hirsch]

It really feels like you're getting punched in the face a lot. And it's this weird dichotomy because as you said, we kind of like, at every moment we were like, no, the strategy feels correct. You know, it feels right. And everything that's going on in the industry and as we are making progress, we're like making good time on it. But yeah, when your family and your friends and the outside world and your employees are maybe less than enthused about the direction, it's really difficult to sort of manage the two. I think there's probably two aspects to it. There's one, just the. The head game of being like, okay, as. As founders, we have conviction here. And to credit, all of you know, so many of our employees were on board and excited as well. But like, a lot of it was just trust in us. And that dichotomy of like, are we crazy? You know, are we just like completely full of it?

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, you are, but. But you're right about this.

[Hirsch]

And then there's just like the day to day tactical stuff where it just hurts a lot. You know, I think press and then managing morale, people leaving and attrition, you know, hiring becomes way more difficult and so it just feels like you're on very hard mode during that. That transition.

[Dan Shipper]

And you had a kid a year ago. Yeah.

[Hirsch]

I mean, and Joshua, that. Two kids. So I'm on no sleep. So that's been. I. You're just. Yeah, it's. It's a meditative exercise to stay present and just get through every day, I think.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah. I. I will say, there was one session I had with my coach where he was asking me something about the product strategy. No, he. He asked me how I was doing, and I gave him one of these kind of excited, genuine takes on this. Whatever the equivalent of the Dustin prototype was, which was Ernest. We said, no, Josh, how are you doing? How do you feel? I was like, I've been waking up every morning with a pit in my stomach. And he was like that. Let's talk about that. And so this year, professionally, was by far the heaviest I felt like, in my body. And. And I think the things that get you through it are both Hirsch and I have. We're really close with our partners and our families and each other. I think one of the things that Hirsch and I have this dynamic is we both go through funks and highs, and we both have the things that trigger us. And we've now worked together long enough where I think there are these moments where, like, I'm really low and people may not know it, but Hirsch knows the telltale signs and he knows how to pull me out of it. And I'd like to think the same is true with him, but.

[Hirsch]

And vice versa. Yeah.

[Josh Miller]

No, it's not fun at all. Obviously, there are things that keep you going, and I think for me, it has really been just trying to stay present and quiet and focused on the internal. There is something in there is making you get punched, that you're okay getting punched in the face. And so. But no, it was a year of constant doubt and ups and downs. Because I think the other thing people miss is the browser company had a Cinderella story. First few years, we basically had no. I mean, didn't feel like this in the moment, but in retrospect, our biggest challenge was at one point, Ark was so popular and so taking off that we had these performance and reliability issues where it was crashing. And that was, like, the hardest thing we had. We were sort of like this darling in terms of people in our industry raving about it. The guy who ran Chrome for 16 years came to work for us as an IC, like, it was just a storybook. And so it was also, after 3ish years of the experience of the browser company feeling like a. Not a runaway success. We had our challenges and I'm sure you remember them, Dan, but it did sort of feel almost like our divine right that it was going to go this well. And so I think all of a sudden having it so clearly feel different and never, almost a never ending to the. Every morning there was some new thing someone was leaving or some competitor, this or whatever. Yeah, it's, it's, it's tough. I will say it makes. Part of the reason I think I feel so elated right now is not because we're out of the woodwork. In many ways, we are in the most competitive, the challenged market in the world. Right. Like, there's a lot is still ahead of us, but part of what it is is this sort of vindication might be a strong word, but like, we were right. So if anything, I don't think that will ever happen to me again professionally. Not that I won't have tough moments, but it's almost like taught me. My dad told me that one thing about getting older is like, you get to like build your intuition because every time something happens, you can look back and say, okay, was I right or wrong? What was I right about? What was I wrong about? And you gain that confidence. So right now I'm not this, I'm not this confident that D is going to be the next Chrome, but I know that what me and her felt in our bones was correct. And so I'm ex. I'm almost excited for, in 20 years, if I ever started another company with Hirsch, that moment I'll be like, okay, we're gonna get punched in the face. But like, don't let, don't waver. I definitely had a lot of moments of doubt internally, privately with Hirsch throughout the year. That manifested in all sorts of ways. But I'm grateful as a, for the life experience of like, what it has taught me. Regardless of what happens next, honestly, I feel you.

[Dan Shipper]

I mean, I, I've had not quite the same kind of thing, but a couple moments where the company just like almost fell apart. And it was like, like I could just stop and it could just be like, things are just not working. And I was like, no, I think I'm gonna keep going. And those definitely have been the. In retrospect, now that things have seemed like they're going well, like big self trust moments where you're like, there's something inside of me that I can listen to and that I think as a leader is really, really important. And it's something you only win by. Unless you're delusional. You only win by, like, going through that. Like, oh, my God, things are about to fall apart, but I'm kind of, like, doing it anyway and then being like, oh, it worked.

[Hirsch]

The doing it anyway is really feels true. You know, some days you just wake up and you have to play the part, get through the day and, yeah, you just get through it.

[Dan Shipper]

I want to talk now about just like. Josh, you mentioned the competitive environment. How are you guys thinking about. Okay, we've got some validation. People are excited about this. It's still really early and now there's a big target on our back. Like, everyone is starting to figure out, oh, the browser might be a really important layer to be competing at. I. I will say if you've been reading every. I've been talking about that for a couple years, but. But if you're not reading every, it feels like now people are sort of really starting to like. Like starting to wake up to it. Perplexity, I think, has a browser or they're at least working on one. There's rumors that a couple of the big AI AI labs are really paying attention to this. So how are you thinking about how to win as a still relatively small company compared to the big incumbents and then compared to other startups? Like, yeah, how. How do you think about winning?

[Josh Miller]

On most podcasts, I'd give you the answer that I would give a VC personally. You know, it's like, okay, we think memory is going to lock you in in this way and our platform and our design. I think the truth is we had the same questions with Ark and I. We. You. We've been in this industry long enough, like, whether it's naive enough. I just feel like we have a clarity of thought and perspective that to me, from what I've seen from other companies and heard, feels somewhat unique. And I think we have a sensibility that, like, we just gotta run as fast as we can, but not frantically and not out of scarcity of beating competitors. But if we can stay locked into just being like, yeah, that most energetic, like, this is what we believe selves. Like, that's the truth of how I think we're going to compete and how we've competed so far since the beginning of the company. Again, I don't want to, like, diminish all the thought we've put into the ways in which, like, okay, if someone clones our browser pixel for pixel, what can we do? But I think at the end of the day, I think one of the things we're grappling with as an industry is what are the moats anymore? More, I think so many of the traditional moats for product. So much about this moment is questioning these dogmas that I had just taken as natural law of how our industry works and products and competition. So that, I don't know, maybe I'm feeling a little bit too hippie dippy right now, but I'm sort of just like, it's all noise. It is all noise. Just like it was noise before and it's noise. It's just a distraction. Like, if anything, I regret spending so much, much time this past year thinking about things outside of our company instead of just like putting our hat down and having fun with it. And I think everything that has resonated so far were parts of the product and the strategy. We're just like, can I curse? Like, it. Like, let's just have some fun with it. If we're gonna get punched in the face, let's just go and do the thing. Let's just be unapologetic. And the places where we did that are what people can feel it. There's like a character to it. And the places that were very, like, like, like top down and, and, and not even top down, just like, you know, let's, let's business. Let's get ready for the HP HBS case study. Just like you feel it.

[Dan Shipper]

Here's how I should do this.

[Josh Miller]

It's just, I think, you know, or maybe that's, maybe that's a weakness as me as a leader and. But I. That the answer is like, Dan, we're gonna do our thing. Like we've been doing our thing. My learning from the last years, when we do our thing, like, at least some people resonate with it and we've got some foresight. So yeah, I'm excited to see the other.

[Dan Shipper]

I think what you're saying is vibes is the moat and you'll figure out the rest, which I, I actually love. I think that that's totally right.

[Josh Miller]

I mean, here's the thing that I've thought a lot about. I am a Dau. I love ChatGPT. I love that product. There are things, some things I would personally do differently, but like, I love that product. Remember this conversation with OpenAI like a year or two ago? Oh, now like every, you know, we got Google's coming in. It's like you use those products and they feel derivative. They feel like someone said, oh, we gotta go like that. Yeah, that's the feature. Let's go do that thing too. From an intellectual perspective. But you can feel whether or not you like it or not. You can feel this is a research lab that, like, decided they were gonna make their life's mission to do this a long time ago. And now their conviction is building and those intuitions building for what matters. And I'm not saying that ChatGPT is going to be the end all, be all, or there won't be other things, but I think, what would Sam Altman have said? You know, I'm not comparing myself to Sam Altman, but two years ago, when it's like, all right, now what? It's a simple product. It's just chat. Google has all the TPUs and it's like, why has ChatGPT continued to be the fastest growing company of all time? What's their moat? So I don't know.

[Hirsch]

Yeah, Vibes is definitely one. I also think there's some systemic things about our company that I am excited for in this new race. One is I think the assume you don't know. I think we built so much of our culture and how we build products to build entirely new things, which is very different from copying or, you know, seeing what's in the market and sort of like taking. Taking inspiration, perhaps. And so I'm excited that we have sort of the machinery and the muscle and the people and the inspiration to like, in this entirely new world, figure out what works. And then I think the second is taste. You know, I think like our Josh and our designers, I'm just like blown away by what they come up with on a weekly basis.

[Josh Miller]

I would also say for the, for the every audience, I think there is a. There are conversations. We have a lot internally that I would be shocked if the Perplexity team or whoever else talks about this in the context of the browser, which is when I see things from other companies in this space. And I can say this because this is where we started too. It's like, it's very engineering tech forward. Hey, there's some new computer use model and we're gonna go have it do a bunch of tasks for you and you're gonna like, we're gonna book that thing for you. And it's like, it's, it's. We. We started that. Like, I get it. I totally get it.

[Hirsch]

It.

[Josh Miller]

What I've found is I'm having this, like, very interesting. I was a sociology major and I. And I'm sure you've seen this too, Dan, where I, I find myself talking to people not in Tech. It'll be at like a party on the weekend. I'll meet someone somehow it'll come. AI will come up chatgpt and almost to a person, everyone's like, yeah, like it's kind of weird. I think it's weird. I'm kind of feel weird talking about it but like I'm like asking it for advice or like I got its help with this like health thing and it like I don't know if it was right, but I felt better at the end of it. And there are people, there's like an emotional intelligence to these models that because of the origins of what the research labs and the sorts of people that are at the forefront right now that are more driven I think by the benchmarks and, and the, and the raw iq, which again is, is spectacular. We're, we're really excited about going back to this home on the Internet. Like, okay, if we have, if we know what you do every day personally, professionally, and these models are, can be subjective and think and give advice and joke, at least give the perception of it. Brainstorm. What are things you can do at the intersection of yes, you got it. You have a job. You don't want a browser, that's your therapist. No one wants that. That's not what I'm saying. But actually I think, okay, when you think about the tasks and the workflows that have high economic value that you get paid for that are on your to do list, there's a component that's clicking buttons for sure and we should click those buttons for you. But the hard part about it is not checking out. That's a minor nuisance that yes, computers should solve and are on their way to solving. The thing is, all right, I'm going upstate with my family to where you guys are at the end of August, which town do I go to? Which one would we like? What's kid friendly? Like, we don't really want something fancy fancy. But also like I'm kind of like don't want to sleep in a tent, you know, for this vacation. And those kind of qualitative subjective reasoning in our opinion is actually where a lot of the like, if the value is going to keep going up the stack in like Maslow's hierarchy, I guess is another way to say it. So if we're just going to assume we have this like cheap intelligence commoditized across models, accessible can click buttons can do things for you. That's important. But where's the value going to be then? I think it's going to keep moving up to some of this more emotional intelligence stuff. And so I. I'd be surprised if the other AI browsers have that so central to their North Star versus the like, you're going to have these agents that are going to go do these things for you, and that's important, but it's. To us, it's missing the force for the trees a little bit. It.

[Dan Shipper]

On that sort of like emotional intelligence and sociology point. I had Nash on this podcast maybe a year ago, who's your head of storytelling, who is incredible. And one of the things that I really loved about her perspective, which I assume, Josh, you. You share in, in this approach, is we were talking about how she. How. How you guys came up with, like, the laptop class and how you think about marketing. And it was very like, well, I was like, listening to this, like, Janis Joplin record, and I was thinking about, like, that era of music and the social change that was happening. So it was very kind of rooted in what are historical examples of moments that are kind of like this, but also thinking about moments and technology and music and art as being part of a conversation and being the next turn in a conversation. One thing that I know is true about your approach is you're always taking inspiration from really diverse, weird, interesting artistic sources to help inform the product direction how you think about things. And I'm curious what those are right now for DIA and for the features that you're thinking about building.

[Josh Miller]

Yeah, I think you're right that we've always drawn inspiration as much from places and moments outside of technology industry. And today, one of the things that's interesting at the time we're recording this podcast is, I think, just like every week, it feels like there's new breakthroughs in the AI space from a technology perspective. I feel like our own intuition and understanding is. And conception of what we have in front of us is changing as well. But I'd say the things on my mind right now, I'm going on vacation next week, so what am I going to read about and think about? I had this conversation with my closest friend, my Dan Shipper, best man in my wedding, who is just. He's not in tech, but he's always been the one that was like, hey, the Snapchat thing is going to be huge. So if I ever started a VC fund, like, I'm hiring this guy just to be like the mystic soothsayer. And he was the first one. Again, not a tech industry guy that was like, there's not a thing in My life, I do Josh. That is an important project for work or my personal life that I'm not working with. AI, getting advice. I forget the word he used advice. Collaborating with. So to what I said before, that feels like the profound shift in the world that I see outside of the industry is happening. And so that sort of new relationship with technology and with this intelligence makes me want to read about. Honestly, romanticism. I wish I could go back to college and like, you know, yeah, my. My. Someone I work with. Abby actually dropped a bunch of books on my desk for this vacation with little notes. They're all romanticism related and what I should. What chapters I should look at. So I'm really excited to understand how in the past, what that. When. When your relationship changed with technology and even what it was and what was possible, how did society and art and culture react? And then the second thing I'm really excited to spend more time thinking about are what are the objects or places in your life that, given the centrality, that importance, if you're doing every. Every project in your personal, professional life, how do you build comfort, a sense of safety in those spaces, even when maybe there aren't. Weren't as comfortable as you wish they were or not as safe as you wish they were? How do they feel like yours? How do they. You know, this is really squishy stuff to some, but, you know, I. I played the percussions and drums growing up, and I remember, you know, I got a really cheap drum set. I was a kid, and at some point I was like, considering getting a new one, but it was like, man, the way that you wear in the snare and like, again, I know this sounds kind of like. Or as a baseball player, like the mitt. I think these. Those sort of references are a little overdone, honestly. So I'm excited to go like, a click deeper on that. You know, I picked up Christopher Alexander as, like, stereotypical as it is. Like, I'm gonna go. I'm going back to Christopher Alexander. So to me, that that is gonna be whether it's us or someone else. I want a timestamp in 24 months. I predict that the AI interface that people feel the deepest affinity and value from will be the one that they actually have the deepest kind of emotional connection to. And not in a way that they're, like, having with the bot or anything like that, but actually just from the perspective of this, like, intangible feeling in the same way, I guess, you know, iPhone versus the Android at this point, there's not A good reason? I don't know. So anyways, you can kind of hear the answers kind of all over the place. But that's honestly how we kind of do it at the browser company.

[Dan Shipper]

I think this is great. I mean, I'm very, very also into Romanticism and for people who are, who are listening and they're like romance novels. It's the reason I like romanticism. I think it's relevant. And I'm curious what your take is. Is like Romanticism was a movement in the 19th century that was a response to Enlightenment rationalism, basically from the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries where physics was so successful that it sort of took over the rest of culture. And we can still sort of see that in a lot of ways. But starting with, you know, Galileo and Newton and that that revolution, there was a push to reduce everything in our life and our experience to things that we could explain in physics, more or less, which is still the case. And romanticism was a 19th century movement to be like, actually there's a lot about human experience that is more like Vibe. Vibes based.

[Hirsch]

Intangible.

[Dan Shipper]

Intangible. And that, that's actually like one of the best parts of human experience. And so there's a lot of art and work from that period in Europe and in the United States that touches on that. And I think language models are a weirdly romantic coded technology because they are so squishy. It's the first example of software we've ever had that you can't reduce to rules in the same way that you can regular software and you have to work with on Vibes. And I think that's a huge shift for software and for culture generally.

[Josh Miller]

And does it sound familiar? You know, if someone was listening to what you just described, it sort of describes the world today in a lot of ways. And it's one of the things, I still feel a love hate relationship with this kind of AI industry, if you want to call it. It's extremely rational, extremely mechanical, extremely. The benchmarks and the capabilities. But you know, reviewing these on every three, you can, you can see the Swede benchmark and then you can feel it. And there's a difference there. And then it's also, I think, very relevant in terms of the like, there's what it can like intellectually do and how powerful it is. But what do you want? I think that's what we're going to be grappling with as a society in the next five years is these sort of like almost things that sound philosophical or like, you should be in university talking about them. I think it's gonna be really important again for us for the first time in a long time. Like. Like what. What do we want from this life? And I know when I've heard podcasts and people talk about that, I'm like, oh, my God, I gotta turn this thing off. So hopefully people don't stop listening right now. But I, I will say I it. I would encourage people, even if you're just going to chatgpt or dear or whatever, like, do a couple queries about romanticism and find and replace some of the nouns with where we are today. And to me, when Abby kind of reminded me of this, it just was. I can't unsee it. It. So I'm excited. I'm gonna do like a Romanticism 101 class for the next week in the mountains and, you know, sorry for everyone at our all hands of the Monday I get back, you're gonna get like a, A, a lecture about, you know, awe and magic or.

[Dan Shipper]

I love it. If you, if you wanna.

[Josh Miller]

Maybe that's what our every essay should be about. Maybe we wr a romanticism essay.

[Dan Shipper]

That would be great. I love that idea.

[Hirsch]

How would we not?

[Dan Shipper]

Well, Josh Hirsch, this is amazing. Thank you so much for, for coming on and talking to us and good luck with dia. We are. We're so back.

[Josh Miller]

We're back.

[Hirsch]

Thank you for having us.

[Josh Miller]

We're back. Thanks for having us, Dan. Oh, my gosh, folks, you absolutely, positively have to smash that, like, button and subscribe to AI and I.

[Dan Shipper]

Why?

[Josh Miller]

Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs. About ChatGPT. Every episode is a rollercoaster of emotions, insights, and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat, craving for more. It's not just a show. It's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor. Hit like smash, subscribe, and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely, hopelessly in love with you.