Tech analyst, AI & the web
Richard MacManus Last week Mark Surman, president of the Mozilla Foundation, published an article explaining why Mozilla is “doing for AI what we did for the web.” He also pointed to a new strategy document that is “focused just as much on AI as it is on the web.” Part of Mozilla’s new AI-centric strategy is an … Read more
At this month’s Google Web AI summit, the primary focus was client-side AI in the browser — but we also heard a lot about Model Context Protocol (MCP) and its web variant, WebMCP, agents, and how “compute abstractions” like WebGPU and WebNN are enabling web developers to access device hardware. After an introduction by Google’s … Read more
The Google Web AI summit was held earlier this month as an invite-only event in Sunnyvale, Calif. After the event, I caught up with the organizer, Jason Mayes, who leads Web AI initiatives at Google. The last time I’d interviewed Mayes was February 2023, when our main topic of conversation was TensorFlow.js — a JavaScript … Read more
Microsoft Research has just launched an open source environment for studying agentic markets, called Magentic Marketplace. In advance of the release, I spoke to Ece Kamar, Managing Director of the AI Frontiers Lab at Microsoft Research. Kamar’s research group had previously developed AutoGen, an agentic development framework that has become popular with Python developers — … Read more
For Vercel’s Andrew Qu, OpenAI’s new ChatGPT Apps platform presented a challenge. “ChatGPT initially designed their apps to be static HTML pages, cached, so they can deliver a consistent but static experience to everyone,” he told The New Stack. “But the web has progressed all this time to make things more dynamic… so to sort … Read more
2025 has been the year of AI agents, and most of the developer attention so far has been on the frameworks and tools to build these agents. We’ve seen a flurry of launches in this space recently: OpenAI’s AgentKit and Agents SDK, Anthropic’s Claude Agent SDK, Google’s Agent Development Kit (ADK) and Vertex AI Agent … Read more
This week VoidZero announced Vite+, which it calls “a unified toolchain for JavaScript.” The company’s founding CEO Evan You, who created Vite and also the web framework Vue, wrote that “Vite+ is a command-line developer tool you can install from npm, just like Vite itself.” You had talked about Vite+ during my recent interview with … Read more
It’s now almost three years since Elon Musk acquired Twitter. Since then the fediverse — a collection of decentralized web products powered by the W3C standard, ActivityPub — has continued to grow. Bluesky’s AT Protocol also has some intriguing new apps. But overall, app development on these protocols is still in a nascent phase. Let’s … Read more
At its annual DevDay event, OpenAI announced several initiatives for developers — who now number 4 million, according to the company. Of most interest was the new Apps SDK, which allows third-party developers to build web-based applications that run as interactive components inside ChatGPT conversations. OpenAI says it will “begin accepting app submissions for review … Read more
The last time I talked to You.com CEO Richard Socher was July 2022, several months before the launch of ChatGPT changed everything. Back then, Socher, a former Stanford natural language processing (NLP) researcher and chief scientist at Salesforce, had excitedly introduced me to YouCode — a kind of mix between Google search and GitHub Copilot … Read more
This year, MCP (Model Context Protocol) has become the glue that connects AI to the web. Following MCP-UI and NLWeb, we now have another new MCP-related open standard: WebMCP, an initiative of Microsoft and Google. To find out more about WebMCP, I conducted an email interview with Kyle Pflug, group product manager for the web … Read more
Vite, created by Evan You, has become the go-to build tool for modern frontend frameworks, including Vue, SvelteKit, Astro, and React — with experimental support also from Remix and Angular. This all happened within the space of five years! That story will be told in an upcoming documentary film by CultRepo, due for release on … Read more
What if there was an AI coding tool that had algorithms as sophisticated as TikTok’s? That thought experiment is now a reality, with today’s launch of a Chinese AI coding tool called Verdent. The founding CEO is Zhijie Chen, previously head of algorithms at ByteDance — where TikTok was created. According to Chen, Verdent aims … Read more
It was only a matter of time before Google started turning its market-leading Chrome web browser into an “AI browser.” Today, Google began rolling out Gemini in Chrome, starting with Mac and Windows desktop users in the US. It comes with a bunch of new AI functionality — including AI Mode from the address/search bar, … Read more
In his new memoir, This Is For Everyone, Sir Tim Berners-Lee makes it clear he thinks AI agents are the future of the web. “In the near future, our lives will be transformed by AI ‘agents’ which will interact with the web and take actions to achieve specific goals,” he writes in the introduction. “I’ve … Read more