Microsoft’s plan to fix the web: letting every website run AI search for cheap
"So the 10,000-foot-level view is that we've had three big revolutions in personal computing." That's how Ramanathan V. Guha, a technical fellow at Microsoft, begins his explanation of what I had thought was a relatively minor AI announcement coming at this year's Build developer conference. But Guha continues to make his case that what he […]
"So the 10,000-foot-level view is that we've had three big revolutions in personal computing." That's how Ramanathan V. Guha, a technical fellow at Microsoft, begins his explanation of what I had thought was a relatively minor AI announcement coming at this year's Build developer conference. But Guha continues to make his case that what he has created - a new open protocol for the web called NLWeb - is actually an important part of something truly enormous.
Oh, the three revolutions: graphical user interfaces, the internet, mobile. Guha says we're in the middle of the fourth, but doesn't just chalk it all up to artificial intelligence. For him, the new revolution is "being able to communicate with applications, and computers in general, with free-form language." He loves the trend, but not the way it's shaping up. Too much of that new communication, Guha thinks, is mediated by products like ChatGPT, Claude, and yes, even Bing. He doesn't like the idea that the web will be utterly consumed by chatbots, which take all their knowledge and return no value. And he thinks he knows how to fix it.
Guha's big idea is to make it easy for any website or app owner to add ChatGPT-style inter …
