Why Internet Browsers Are Born Again in AI Land.
Who could have guessed that in 2025 web browsers would become the hot new products?
Products like Perplexity Comet, Dia Browser, and OpenAI Browser (soon-to-launch) are all competing to reinvent an interface originally created back in 1993.
When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. Browsers capture genuine human intentions. Every search, click, and tiny decision you make online reveals what you truly want, often better than words alone.
That information is incredibly valuable. It's exactly the kind of data needed to build smarter AI systems. Whoever owns the browser has direct access to understanding human desires.
This makes Chrome's 3 billion users more than just people browsing the web. Web browsing behaviour represent one of the most valuable collections of data in existence.
The AI browser value prop
These AI browsers are fundamentally reimagining how we interact with the web.
Dia lets you ask questions about your open tabs. Comet tries to book your dinner reservation while you're reading reviews. OpenAI's upcoming browser wants to keep you inside a ChatGPT-like interface, turning every web interaction into a conversation.
The value proposition to users is: No more clicking through 15 pages to find what you want. No more opening 20 tabs to compare prices. Just ask, and the AI does the heavy lifting, and help you go deeper on any subject you’re exploring on the web.
Convenience and control
Every time you tell an AI browser "find me a restaurant" or "book this flight," you're feeding it the exact moment of purchase intent. Not just what you searched for, but what you actually chose, how much you paid, what made you change your mind.
That's not just training data. That's the map to human decision-making.
Google built a $300 billion empire on knowing what you searched for. These AI browsers want to know what you actually bought, booked, and decided. They want to sit between you and every transaction on the internet.
Connecting AI with real-world data
During the Grok 4 announcement on July 9, 2025, Elon Musk emphasized that real-world data is the next frontier for AI. He stated that Grok 4 is the first AI capable of solving complex, real-world engineering problems that lack answers on the internet or in books.
"If you combine something like Grok with something like Optimus, where Optimus is interacting with the real world, I think you have the potential to not only solve very difficult real-world problems, but potentially discover new technologies or new physics."
This is the missing piece. LLMs have consumed all the books, all the articles, all the static knowledge humanity has produced. But they're still terrible at understanding how the real world actually works.
Browser interaction data is real-world data. It's not what people say they want in surveys. It's what they actually click on when they have money in their pocket and a problem to solve.
The browser is the gateway to that future.