You’ve reached the AI lifecycle location. There you will see many “X Meets Y” applications. For example, several companies have already released the “AI Meets Tiktok” app. Now, Berlin and New York-based startup DETA is married to something like Google’s Notebook Rum with an AI browser and a new knowledge management app called Surf.
Released in beta today, Deta Surf is both a browser and a research tool that allows you to create notebooks on a variety of topics. You can use AI to get the gist of a specific topic based on the prompt. Next, you will get a summary report on the topic in a document with a concept style that you can edit.
The core application is a browser so you can open a URL and surf the web. While viewing, you can summarise and extract important insights from web pages, PDFs, and YouTube videos.
Users can mention multiple tabs in the AI chatbot, use them as context and ask questions around them. Additionally, Deta Surf can generate code, allowing you to ask for mini apps for notebooks, interactive graphs, or tools to create charts. You can also add output from AI to a specific notebook.
Most modern AI browsers, such as Perplexity’s Comet, browser company DIA, and Opera Neon, allow users to use tabs as context. Some of them also have the ability to generate small snippets of code.
Founded in 2019, DETA set out to build a new operating system using endless white canvas. However, the company started working on AI browsers after its products were sunset in 2023.
The company’s co-founder Max Eusterbrock said the company has investigated various interfaces in its browser, but he realized that pursuing this direction is a bad idea.
“We were in Alpha for a year. During that time, we noticed that AI browsers were landing in a place where machines that click and navigate human-oriented hypertext were essentially becoming tools,” he said.
Eusterbrock added that the startup thinks that the interface that can’t be edited is not a great design for human machine interaction.
The product works like a browser, but startups consider NoteBookLM to be a direct competitor. Eusterbrock believes it is a suitable product for students and researchers as it provides the context of tabs and allows SURF to keep data locally and work offline in notebooks.
The company makes the tool free of charge and is working on image generation capabilities. It may work in the future for premium subscriptions that include features such as cloud backup, collaboration, and multi-device clients.
In 2023, Deta raised $3.6 million in seed rounds with participation from System.One, Tomahawk.VC, Tiny.VC, Acequia Capital, Angel Invest and NPHARD led by Crane Venture Partners. Since then, the company has raised an additional $500,000 in funding from existing and new investors.
