Flutterby™! : semi-autonomous AI bots are eating the world

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semi-autonomous AI bots are eating the world

2026-03-20 18:45:48.174639+01 by Dan Lyke 0 comments

I subscribed to Wired (sometime within the past year) 'cause they had a cheap offer and there was an article I thought it worth reading, so this morning's email has a link to Google Shakes Up Its Browser Agent Team Amid OpenClaw Craze. I was looking for a non-subscription link to paste into the company Slack, and found Times of India — Google is shaking up its AI team, and the reason is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's newest obsession which has some interesting speculation about the AI powered browser market, and why Google might be abandoning Project Mariner:

In practice, the numbers were underwhelming. Perplexity's Comet browser agent peaked at 2.8 million weekly active users last December. OpenAI's ChatGPT Agent has since slipped below 1 million—negligible against the hundreds of millions who use ChatGPT just to chat. The category never found its mass-market moment.

Meanwhile, the semi-autonomous bots that are filling that product category instead are wreaking havoc on the world: EnshittifAIcation.

Rewarding confidence over actual competence is a bug humanity has always had. It has produced disasters throughout history, it is producing disasters now, and not only in the tech world.

That latter one via Lobste.rs.

[ related topics: Content Management History Astronomy Current Events Graphics Artificial Intelligence Economics ]

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