We’ve been hearing that AI is going to change the world and take thousands of jobs, but the most immediate impact for many people might be on how they use and experience the internet. The Browser Company’s new Arc Search app shows that AI can quickly find, summarize, and organize information in a way that could make traditional search engines obsolete.
Arc Search scours the internet and creates a summary page of relevant information on a topic. Imagine clicking on the top ten links on a Google search and creating a PowerPoint slide on the query, and you’ll have a good idea of how Arc Search works. It’s part search engine, part browser, and part chatbot in a way that still needs development work but is an impressive bit of engineering as it sits.
The app’s “browse for me” feature uses sources from across the internet, so there are some good and bad apples among the links that it grabs. Even still, as The Verge pointed out, it’s a step forward from other tools that function more like internet-enabled chatbots than anything resembling intelligence.
Arc also works as a web browser, but there are significant questions about the company’s future. The controversy over how AI utilizes copyrighted and existing content is just getting started, and the question of how the company funds itself going forward could be an existential one. We know that running large-scale AI operations is resource-intensive and requires a ton of money, so Arc Search could become a paid or subscription app in the future.