Josh Miller, the Browser Company, and the Claude 2.1 Model: How Openai Invented War and Peace in Silicon Valley, and How OpenAI Made Sense of War
Josh Miller laughs a few minutes into our conversation and admits that he almost declined today’s interview about the Browser Company. The young CEO is jetlagged from a flight to Paris but appears comfortable over Zoom and eager to talk about Arc, an alternative web browser with AI tools. What is the reason for his hesitancy? “We weren’t sure if we wanted more people to use it,” says Miller. “It’s legitimately a problem how [many] people are interested.” He faces an enviable issue for a software leader.
On the cover of our 1997 March issue, WIRED editors declared, “The Web browser itself is about to croak.” It was not a good day! Not only are browsers still here, ribbiting along, but developers continue to update the user experience of clicking around online.
The largest user base of any internet browser is not the first to use a chatbot powered by generative artificial intelligence. Microsoft released a nascent version of its Edge browser that uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT model at the start 2023. By the time Google launched sign-ups for the Search Generative Experience in May, multiple smaller companies and startups were also poised to launch AI tools for browsers.
Miller, who previously worked as a product manager at Facebook and the White House under Obama, led Arc to its 1.0 launch around the same time, sans chatbot tools. Positive reviews and influential users of the software are what made it a hit.
Even though Openai dominated the conversation in Silicon Valley, the board’s decision to undermine Altman and speed run through new CEOs may have created a window of opportunity. (Despite the fact that Altman eventually returned to continue leading OpenAI.) And while these product updates were months in the making, the timing couldn’t have been better for OpenAI competitors. Many enterprise customers of Openai’s tools were scared by Altman’s departure, and were considering moving to Anthropic or another provider.
The Claude 2.1 model was given two key updates. There’s the ability to upload more data at once, and there are fewer lies. The limit of Claude’s token has been set at 200,000, which is approximately 500 pages. You have to wait until the next update to analyze all of War and Peace in one prompt. The rate limit for the GPT-4Turbo model is capped at 128,000.
And, Anthropic claims that the new Claude is more likely to admit when it’s unsure of an answer, rather than fibbing with the utmost confidence. According to the company’s post, we tested Claude 2.1’s honesty by gathering large set of complex, factual questions that probe known weaknesses in current models. A lack of veracity, often described as hallucinations, continues to be a major issue for chatbots.
Stable Video Diffusion, Claude 2.1, and OpenAI: The Cosmic Coincidence of OpenAI and HubSpot
When you input a prompt into the text-to- video model, the Artificial Intelligence spits out animated animations that range from gorgeous to disturbing. Stable Video Diffusion can add motion to your images, which can be transformed into videos.
While this isn’t technically a new feature from OpenAI, the company rolled out ChatGPT with voice capabilities to everyone in the short period while Altman was out as CEO. Users who paid a monthly fee for OpenAI’s service were previously able to use the feature.
It’s not yet giving Spike Jonze’s Her, but the software developers at OpenAI took another big step towards their goal of “multimodality” by giving the chatbot the ability to hold a conversation with you. The idea is that a chatbot can be even more powerful if it can accept inputs and provide outputs in multiple mediums, like voice, text, and images. Who knows when it’ll learn how to smell.
“Feels like every week, there’s something new being launched or announced from one of the major players. So, my guess is that the launches of Stable Video Diffusion and Claude 2.1 were likely just a coincidence,” says Dharmesh Shah, who’s the CTO and cofounder of HubSpot as well as an OpenAI shareholder.
The turmoil at OpenAI has riveted the tech industry and kept entrepreneurs, journalists, and anyone who is still an X account interested in the latest updates and lower case missives. Drop new products is what Silicon Valley is known for, which is why Openai continued to do in the meantime.