Sometimes it’s hard to remember a time before the internet, but I do remember shelves in my bedroom growing up dedicated to an Encyclopedia collection. And then, some years later, I’d get another CD at our local bookstore guaranteeing several hours of access to America Online… and then once, well, online… I was certainly on the internet but that was a world without Google. Years after that Google was a cornerstone of the internet but you were getting there in a window (not a tab) in Internet Explorer. Then, in possibly the final form of that era of the internet… you had broadband bandwidth, a Chrome browser, and the indexed power of the full internet through a Google search baked into every tab. 

Why the mini history lesson of the Internet? Because, in the end, it took a browser to cement Google’s place atop the mountain of that era. So, as we sit here on the precipice of a brand new one… with LLM’s, AI powered agents, and Generative AI everywhere we turn… should it really surprise us that one of the names attached at the hip to this moment is suddenly very, very excited to be launching their very own web browser? 

Yes, platforms like ChatGPT are changing our relationship not only with the internet but with technology itself. It may be riddled with issues, under delivered promises, and outright broken concepts (because it is), but the inescapable truth is there’s also no going back. But with massive swaths of our daily lives at work, at home, and many places in between still taking place in a browser tab… are we ready to cede it to the very ones charting the course of this next technological era? 

George Lucas once said that Star Wars “rhymes”… it was an eloquent-ish way of saying it repeats itself… a lot. At this point I’m pretty sure tech does, too…