- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
AI-integrated development environment (IDE) company Cursor recently implied it had built a working web browser almost entirely with its AI agents. I won’t say they lied, but CEO Michael Truell certainly tweeted: “We built a browser with GPT-5.2 in Cursor.”
He followed up with: “It’s 3M+ lines of code across thousands of files. The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust with HTML parsing, CSS cascade, layout, text shaping, paint, and a custom JS VM.”
That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? He also added: “It kind of works,” which is not the most ringing endorsement…
Too bad it wasn’t true. If you actually looked at Cursor engineer Wilson Lin’s blog post about FastRender, the AI-created web browser, you won’t see much boasting about a working web browser. Instead, there’s a video of a web browser sort of working, and a much less positive note that “building a browser from scratch is extremely difficult.”
Developers quickly discovered the “browser” barely compiles, often does not run, and was heavily misrepresented in marketing.
…this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens and would have cost several million dollars at then‑current list prices for frontier models.
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this week‑long autonomous browser experiment consumed in the order of 10-20 trillion tokens
at $60/m, that is $600M to $1.2B in full price cost, but 1/4 this is current standard pricing. Still, even if a buggy piece of shit, a 1-3m line code project in a week is impressive. OTOH, netscape 1.0 cost $4M to develop, with the advantage of working (though other advantage that it was your web page’s fault for not working).
They set a very challenging experiment. There is a reason for chromium being a popular base for a browser. The more interesting experiment result is if it is ever usable. Are the bugs solvable by AI.
The rendering engine is from-scratch in Rust
That’s a lie. LLM don’t do “from scratch”.
And Heise (german IT-newspaper) tested it too: crashes on X, a bit less on wayland, urlbar sometimes not working, scrolling neither, stuff like that. In short, it’s crap.
With all the shortcomings, you’re going to be complaining about the definition of “from scratch”…
Just curious, what’s your definition of it, when it’s a person writing code.
It’s a double lie! It also uses a bunch of rust libraries
Yeah I was gonna say, how much similarity is there with servo?
But to be fair nobody does anything from scratch. Most people were in school at least for a few years. If you code, you’ve probably read a lot of code and documentation, if you draw you probably saw a lot of drawings, if you play chess you probably studied a lot of different games.
This is a dumb take. You didn’t understand the assignment.
“From scratch” in software engineering usually means it was written without a starting point, being based off an existing implementation. It doesn’t mean it was written by someone who indepdently discovered computer science and software engineering on their own.
You’re trying to regurgitate a pro-AI argument you read somewhere that defends OpenAI and others’ use of open source software to train their commercial models without paying, following open source licensing requirements, or even providing acknowledgement of their source (typically called “copyright infringement” or “plagiarism” when-non-billionaires do it). The argument you are plagiarising here tries to conflate human learning with AI training, which is as stupid as me saying that downloading movies for free is legal because I’m “training” my brain on that content.
If you like AI slop, that’s cool. Idgaf. But if you’re going to wade into the controversies and politics though, maybe think a little harder before making a fool of yourself? The people you’re trying to argue with likely haven’t had their brain and critical thinking skills turned to mush by using LLMs as much as you have.
I think the only problem with the plagiarism is that the AI companies are profiting off acceess to it which would point to a different roor cause to the problem.
I can’t tell what your opinion is, because when you say, “copyright infringement or plagiarism when non billionaires do it” are you just angry that the rules are unfair or that there is actually something inherently wrong with reusing code?
I wasn’t really trying to give my opinion, but since you asked…
I think copyright laws are a good thing for everyone. They’re definitely not perfect, but they do much more good than harm. The problem (which is not unique to copyright) is that the legal system treats large corporations differently than individuals and small businesses. The recent AI hype wave has supercharged this problem, but it’s not new.
there is actually something inherently wrong with reusing code?
Depends on what you mean. Open source software usually comes with a license attached, which is effectively a permission slip from its creator telling you what you can or can’t do with it. Without that pernission, you’d be violating their rights under copyright laws unless you limit yourself to what counts as “fair use”. That’s perfectly fine, and I don’t see why anyone reasonable would take issue with that.
I know there are some fringe people out there who think copyright law shouldn’t exist at all, and that no individual deserves the right to exclusively profit off of their creative works. I don’t agree with that, and I don’t see how open source would work in that scenario as nobody would want to release anything. It’d make exploitation of the poor by the wealthy even more extreme, as those with the means to mass produce derivative products (eg you own a factory that can produce paintings or whatever) would be the only ones making a living off intellectual properties.
But this is getting way off topic. I just wanted to call that guy stupid.
How exactly is the copyright system good? It’s literally just a tool for large companies to stifle competition.
There are a lot of FOSS projects that are done because people simply want to do them, your assumption that only the profit motive gets people to do literally anything is very telling. The profit motive is exactly why our society is as horrible as it is, healthcare, government corruption, the entertainment industry in general, just look around and tell me things are going well when we go into literally everything hoping to be able to profit off other people.
Copyright and most “intellectual property” laws are simply stifling the human race in the name of disproportionately enriching the few who have absolutely enjoyed the free labor of others to get to the place they are now.
I’m not saying people shouldn’t be rewarded for doing good work, but that’s not what this system actually accomplishes. It’s just the illusion of a system of meritocracy.
It’s literally just a tool for large companies to stifle competition.
This is obviously wrong, but reveals the direction a conversation with you would take. No thanks.
Have a nice day.
Shhh there’s something inherently different about humans reusing code and ideas they’ve seen and a prediction engine doing it, morally, apparently.
Cursor? I hardly know er!!
Title made me feel like it will do the marketing for me, so I can freelance instead of having to go to some stinky office.
Such a let down.deleted by creator
