A week in Generative AI: Web 4.0, NVIDIA & Windsurf
News for the week ending 13th July 2025
This week wasn’t a big week in terms of the volume of AI news, but probably a big one in terms of significance. Perplexity launched their Comet browser, and I’ve shared my thoughts below on something I’ve been talking about lot about this year - Web 4.0, the next era of the Internet that will be AI-mediated instead of human operated.
In other news, NVIDIA topped a $4tr valuation, the first company in history to do so and only 2 years after they first hit a $1tr valuation. Google also completely destroyed OpenAI’s planned acquisition of Windsurf in the latest entry in the great AI talent wars that have seen a ridiculous amount of money being thrown around by big tech for AI researchers. Lastly, Hugging Face opened pre-orders for their open source Reachy Mini robot.
Some good Long Reads this week too from Ethan Mollick, Stratechery, and Charlie Guo.
Web 4.0 - The End of the Internet As We Know It
Something I’ve been talking about a lot this year is how we’re starting to see the transition to a new era of the internet, what I call Web 4.0. The internet as we currently know it runs on advertising and clicks. This providers the users, and revenue that fund the majority of online websites and platforms as we know it.
Web 4.0 is an AI-mediated internet, rather than a human operated one, and as we transition towards it over the next couple of years we’re going to see a reduction in human searches, clicks, and website visits. In fact, we’re already seeing this happen with Google themselves acknowledging that Search will lose traffic to Gemini/ChatGPT etc, the rise of ‘zero click’ searching, and publishers already seeing a dramatic reduction in traffic to their websites.
In the first half of 2025 we’ve seen the ‘early majority’ start to adopt generative AI tools - mostly ChatGPT, Gemini (via Google Search) and Meta’s Llama models (via their aggressive integration into Instagram, WhatApp etc.). The transition to Web 4.0 is accelerating already. And to cap it off, this week Perplexity launched their own web browser, Comet, in their latest move to try and disrupt the traditional, search, click, search browsing pattern. Perplexity’s vision is that you search once - no clicks, and no additional searches. You get what you’re looking for first time and can follow up with additional questions if you want to dig deeper.
OpenAI are rumoured to be launching their own browser, potentially next week. When their browser launches it will take things even further by integrating their AI agent Operator, allowing the browser to automatically perform tasks for people straight out of the box. If it gains mass adoption it will further accelerate the transition to Web 4.0 by completely removing human searches, clicks, and visits from the online equation.
I think many people are underestimating the speed at which the transition to Web 4.0 will happen. We’ll see search volumes decline first, quickly followed by clicks and website visits. This is happening for early adopters now, and I think the early majority will quickly follow next year. This will have a big impact on Google, publishers, and digital marketing with lots of second order effects that will be difficult to foresee and predict.
If you’re involved in Google Search, online publishing, or digital marketing this is the most important thing you should be paying attention to right now. You need to be keeping up-to-date with progress, testing new technologies and approaches, and planning for where the puck will be in 12 months time, as it’s moving faster than many people realise..
NVIDIA becomes first company to reach $4tn in market value
Surprising no one who’s been paying attention, NVIDIA became the first public company in history to hit a valuation of $4tr. Apple was the first company to hit a $1tr valuation back in August 2018, and here we are just 7 years later with a company that’s worth 4x that.
As a reminder, NVIDIA itself only hit a $1tr valuation 2 years ago, back in May 2023. It hit $2tr in February 2024, and $3tr in June 2024. That’s one hell of a tear. They’re directly benefitting from the huge amount of money that’s being poured into AI right now, and especially the huge plans the US (and other markets) have to build out an incredible amount of AI infrastructure over the next 5 years. Many of these new data centres will be home to millions of NVIDIA’s AI chips.
Between NVIDIA, Apple, and Microsoft they account for 20% of the S&P 500’s total value. Just 3 companies of the top 500 valued at over $10tr. Microsoft is expected to hit $4tr later in the year, with Apple probably following next year.
OpenAI’s Windsurf deal is off — and Windsurf’s CEO is going to Google
In another twist in the AI talent war that’s been waging for the past month or so, Google have swept in to poach the CEO, co-founder and some of their researchers just as OpenAI were reportedly trying to close the $3bn acquisition deal for the company.
Windsurf are/were (?!) the company behind the Codeium coding assistant, one of a few coding assistants (inc. Cursor) that have really skyrocketed in usage and value over the last 12 months. OpenAI had built their own approach to this with their Codex model, but many of these AI deals right now are more about the talent than the underlying technology.
This week Meta reportedly recruited Apple’s head of AI models as well. I hate to think how much money has been thrown around by Meta, Google, and OpenAI on talent in the last few months - its definitely more than $10bn, but potentially not much less than $100bn. Crazy!
Hugging Face opens up orders for its Reachy Mini desktop robots
Hugging Face has now opened orders for its open source, desktop robot, Reachy Mini. The target audience for Reach Mini is AI developers of all ages who want to code, build and test physical AI applications.
At $479 for the wireless version, it’s not super cheap, but there is a lite version at $299. Really Mini is 28cm high and weight 1.5kg. the wireless version comes with an inbuilt Raspberry Pi, WiFi, and an accelerometer which are all missing from the lite build.
I’d better start saving for Xmas 🤓!
AI Ethics News
Grok searches for Elon Musk’s opinion before answering tough questions
As Zuck Races to Build Godlike AI, Women and People of Color Aren’t Invited
Musk’s AI firm forced to delete posts praising Hitler from Grok chatbot
"Cat attack" on reasoning model shows how important context engineering is
Long Reads
One Useful Thing - Against “Brain Damage“
Stratechery - Tech Philosophy and AI Opportunity
Charlie Guo - The GPT Era
“The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.“
William Gibson
What impact do you think open ai’s new browser will have. How similar/different do you think it will be to browsers that have ai as a “add on” like Microsoft co pilot