Agentic Browsers Are Coming... Will Google Fumble Again?

AI companies are coming after search. Nvidia hits a record $4T in market cap. Grok4 claims to break benchmarks.

Google birthed - and then fumbled- one of the most catalytic inventions in modern AI.

The Transformer architecture, introduced by a Google Brain team in 2017 while translating English ↔ French, became the backbone of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and nearly every state-of-the-art model since. Google open-sourced the idea but never turned it into a consumer product.

Will history repeat itself with its other golden egg, the Chrome browser, and the ad revenues that bankroll the empire?

AI companies like OpenAI and Perplexity, who were built off the Transformer, are coming after Google’s lunch.

They are starting to launch agentic browsers that bypass traditional browsing and search-query volume.

Today, Chrome is the king of browsers. They command 66-68 % of global browser time and generate about $50 billion per quarter in search revenue.

Their dominance lets Google dictate the rules of online advertising, like whether third-party cookies live or die, which APIs replace them, and how granularly clicks, cart events, and conversions are measured.

If (and it’s a big if) Google loses more of that gatekeeper role, they must pay ever-higher traffic-acquisition costs (TAC) to the next landlord of the internet to keep ad revenue going…if those landlords decide to share real estate at all.

The browser challengers:

• Perplexity Comet (launched this week) embeds an agent in search: ask for “three books Neil Gaiman recommends,” and Comet scours reviews, grabs the titles, and puts them in your Amazon cart.

• Cult favorite Arc launched Dia, which has similar agentic flows that erase page-by-page browsing.

• OpenAI is reportedly close to shipping its own AI-native browser.

Every one of the challenger browsers collapses the classic loop “search → ad → click”, into a single interaction. No scrolling, no cookie pings, quite the minimal surface area for Google’s ad stack. They could displace the browsing UX that powers the digital-ad economy…and, by extension, Google itself.

How we experience the internet is about to change drastically. I believe the secret alpha lies in designing a user experience people love.

Ironically, this is not unlike how Google dethroned the crowded search portals in the 90s quite by accident, when Page and Brin, lacking HTML skills, shipped a blank page with a single box and world-class search architecture.

This week, Nvidia, a mere 32-year-old “newcomer”, vaulted past Apple and Microsoft (both 49-year-old giants) to a $4 trillion market cap. I wouldn’t be surprised if fresh players similarly redraw the Fortune 100 as the internet paradigm shifts.

TTYL.

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The Download

News that mattered this week

1. Nvidia becomes first company to reach $4tn in market value: Nvidia became the first public company in history to scale a $4tn market value this week as its stock price continues a years-long stratospheric rise. This is a crazy rebound from the first half of the year - the stock weathered hits from tariffs risks, and the Deep Seek meltdown, which was trained using less than top-of-the-line chips.

2. Mark Zuckerberg announces his AI ‘superintelligence’ super-group: In a memo to Meta staff, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced the company’s new “Meta Superintelligence Labs” group that will head up its AI work. These engineers typically have deep expertise building state-of-the-art AI models at labs like OpenAI or DeepMind. Zuck Haul’s tracks the poached researchers (and their $$$ paychecks).

3. Figma moves closer to a blockbuster IPO that could raise $1.5B: Figma moves Figma publicly shared its financials, inching the design software company closer to an IPO. IPO experts Renaissance Capital estimate that Figma could raise up to $1.5 billion in this offering. If it does meet or exceed that, Figma’s IPO will match or beat CoreWeave’s, which raised $1.5 billion and has been the biggest tech IPO of 2025 so far.

4. Surge AI reportedly targeting $1 billion in first-ever fundraise: Data labeling company Surge AI is reportedly planning a $1 billion funding round. The firm has hired advisors for the capital raise, which would be the company’s first, Reuters reported. Surge, founded by former Google and Meta engineer Edwin Chen, is aiming for a valuation of more than $15 billion. According to the report, the company took in more than $1 billion in revenue last year.

5. Amazon deploys its 1 millionth robot.That figure puts Amazon on track to reach another landmark: Its vast network of warehouses may soon have the same number of robots working as people, according to reporting from The Wall Street Journal.

6. Cursor launches a web app for managing AI coding agents: Cursor, the AI code editor created by Anysphere, has launched a new web application that brings AI coding agents directly to browser windows.

7. This AI ‘thinks’ like a human: The researchers developed the system, which predicts human decisions with startling accuracy, called Centaur, by fine-tuning an LLM using a massive set of data from 160 psychology experiments, in which 60,000 people made more than 10 million choices across many tasks.

8. Hugging Face just launched a $299 robot that could disrupt the entire robotics industry: The compact 11-inch robot, which can sit on any desk next to a laptop, addresses what CEO Clément Delangue calls a fundamental barrier in robotics development: accessibility.

9. Elon Musk’s xAI launches Grok 4 alongside a $300 monthly subscription: Elon Musk’s AI company xAI released its latest flagship AI model, Grok 4, and unveiled a new $300-per-month AI subscription plan, SuperGrok Heavy. Grok is xAI’s answer to models like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, and can analyze images and respond to questions. xAI launched two models: Grok 4 and Grok 4 Heavy, the latter being the company’s “multi-agent version” that offers increased performance.

10. Microsoft, OpenAI & Anthropic fund a national AI Academy for teachers: The American Federation of Teachers (AFT) has announced the establishment of the National Academy for A.I. Instruction, a new $23 million initiative to train the nation’s educators. The ambitious five-year program aims to train 400,000 educators, which is approximately 10 percent of the U.S. teaching workforce, and will scale nationally from its New York hub.

11. Moonvalley launches first fully licensed AI model for filmmakers: Toronto-based software company Moonvalley released Marey, the first fully licensed, commercially available AI model for the video production industry. Marey is a learning model capable of precision controls, complex VFX sequences, and maintaining complete creative authority for filmmakers and studios.

12. Jack Dorsey launches a WhatsApp messaging rival built on Bluetooth: Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced a new peer-to-peer messaging app that works entirely over Bluetooth. Chats are encrypted, ephemeral and stored only on-device – with no accounts, phone numbers, or servers involved. The app is now live in beta on TestFlight, with future updates set to add WiFi Direct for faster, longer-range communication.

13. Chinese researchers unveil MemOS, the first ‘memory operating system’ that gives AI human-like recall: This research addresses a fundamental limitation that has hindered models from achieving human-like persistent memory and learning. The system, called MemOS, treats memory as a core computational resource that can be scheduled, shared and evolved over time, similar to how traditional operating systems manage CPU and storage resources.

14. Isomorphic Labs, a spinoff from DeepMind, is set to initiate human trials for its AI-designed cancer drugs, aiming to revolutionize drug discovery.

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Double Click

Links to reads we found interesting

• A classroom experiment:How schools are using artificial intelligence (NY Times)

• AI that thinks – New model predicts human decisions with startling accuracy (SciTechDaily)

• China develops robot eyes that react faster than the human eye (Vocal Media)

• Massive study detects AI fingerprints in millions of scientific papers (Phys Org)

• MIT's high-tech 'bubble wrap' turns air into safe drinking water (LiveScience)

• China hosts first fully autonomous AI robot football match (The Guardian)

• A new UK research project aims to produce human DNA entirely from scratch for the first time, with the goal of better understanding diseases and developing new therapies.(Guardian)

• Why AI Databases Won’t Need SQL* (Turing Post)