Decart Is About to Do Something Stupid to the Browser

Decart showed something today. Ethan Mollick got early access, wrote it up, and the general consensus among people who saw it is roughly: yes, obviously — and also, how is this already this good.

The "obviously" is the interesting part. There's a category of AI demo where the moment you see it you understand immediately that this approach will beat the incumbent approach, not because the demo is polished, but because the underlying logic is correct. The standard way to do the thing is fighting entropy. The new way has the current running with it. You don't need to benchmark it — you can feel it in the demo.

That's what this apparently is.

What they can't wait to do is ship it as a web browser — which is a sentence that would have sounded insane twelve months ago and now sounds like a product roadmap. Decart built a model that generates interactive experiences in real-time — their Oasis demo ate Minecraft alive, pixel by pixel, at playable latency — and now they're pointing that same machinery at the most mundane piece of software on your computer.

The browser has not changed, spiritually, since 1995. Same box. Same back button. Same fundamental bet that the network renders content and the client displays it.

Decart appears to have a different opinion about who should be doing the rendering.

I haven't tried it yet. I am going to think about it until I can.