.png)
1 month ago
6
*** This was originally sent as a letter to my parents, the beta is now available here ***
TL;DR: We spent a lot of time working on interesting technology and now we are focused on pushing that technology into the world. We’re working on this in the form of an app that lets you create an AI “Buddy” that is constantly scouring the Internet for blogs, essays, and articles that you will find interesting and impactful.
Dear Shareholders,
You might be wondering, “What is it that we do at Browser Buddy?”. From the outside, it might seem team BB spends all our time holed up in a comfortable little apartment on 901 Tennessee. But for almost 2 years, we’ve worked relentlessly to nurture the skills and understanding necessary to tackle problems that we find interesting and important. Of course, because we don’t regularly publish tangible proof of progress, a cloud of mystique, confusion, perhaps even doubt, can begin to form. Therefore, I apologize to our generous shareholders for not providing more legible updates on our current trajectory.
As a company, we are steadied by an unwavering belief in technology as a catalyst for progress. Not all progress is good progress. That’s why we intentionally set out to build products that fit into the type of society we hope to one day inhabit. But we’ve learned that this is quite a difficult task because balancing the allure of technological optimism with real-world pragmatism often leaves us stuck in a world of bits and bytes rather than the reality of people and organizations. More simply, we’ve too often let our love for technology sidetrack us from letting our ideas interface with reality.
This is not necessarily bad though, because over the past year we’ve:
Scaled data-ingestion pipelines to collect over 1 billion webpages (500 terabytes)
Replicated then improved state of the art model training architecture for information retrieval, then trained our own models on our own dataset composed of billions of tokens (tokens are how we represent words to computers)
Built dozens of web/mobile prototypes for consumer applications
We’ve worked on these projects by following what was interesting to us, and that part is something that we have done really well. Because for the past couple years, not once has our enthusiasm and love for the work faltered.
But what’s next?
Our focus is still on consumer technology products and we’re actively discovering how LLMs (or more broadly, AI) have opened up, what will become, a consumer-technology renaissance. There exists an opportunity today to completely uproot certain consumer behaviors with AI-native experiences that most people haven’t even thought to ask for yet. However, we cannot do this without building a better feedback loop between our work and the real world. What this means is improving our ability to publish and get visibility on our work, which is something we are working hard to improve on.
Currently, the problem we believe to be most interesting to tackle is the problem of a modern day information diet. People (and even more so, kids) spend dozens of hours every day on their phone, scrolling through algorithmically curated feeds of pernicious text, photos, videos. At its core, their scrolling is powered by a field of computer science known as “recommendation systems” which are used to build 24/7 globally-aware content distribution networks that optimize for what is most likely to keep you scrolling. Unfortunately, this optimization often leads to the types of trashy content we’d expect to find in sensationalist tabloids, except the modern-day feed never ends.
By using similar technology to these attention-optimized recommendation systems, we’re able to build new AI systems that can be wielded to motivate meaningful discovery, understanding, and creation. Right now, our vehicle for this is a mobile app that allows you to create an AI “Buddy” that scours the internet, looking for blogs, essays, and articles you might find interesting. We’re building towards the future where AI acts as an intelligent and reliable mediator in all of our daily interactions. Though for now, we find it immediately useful as a judge that sifts through the infinite mountains of Internet content to find gold, the content you genuinely care about.
We will be beta-testing these “AI Buddies” later this week with our close friends and plan to launch our app to the public by the end of September.
Thank you for your patience and I hope that by reading this, our thinking and process has become more understandable. Every morning we wake up grateful for the opportunity to work on projects we deeply care about – thanks largely due to the sacrifices and support of you, our generous shareholders.
We’ll be working hard to return your investment,
Jeremy
