Episode Details

Most of the web will never get APIs for AI agents. School district sites, small business pages, government offices, and the long tail of e-commerce were built for humans, and they will keep working that way for years. So how do agents actually get things done across the web?

Dhruv Batra is co-founder and chief scientist of Yutori, the company building specialized browser and computer-use agents. He previously led embodied AI at Meta's FAIR lab, training robots in simulation and shipping the image question-answering model on Ray-Ban Meta glasses. His bet: the web is a shared roadway, much like roads split between human drivers and self-driving cars, and agents will be built to use it the way people already do.

Pixels in, clicks out. That is the API.

In this conversation:

• Why the long tail of the web won't re-architect itself for agents
• How Yutori's Navigator perceives pixels and writes JavaScript on the fly to shorten task trajectories
• Why Navigator runs 2-3x faster and 4-5x cheaper than Opus 4.7 and GPT-5.5 on browser tasks
• Learning from live websites, and using URL query parameters as privileged verifiers instead of cloning sites
• What the shift from American to Chinese open-weight models means for startups
• How smart glasses and robots share the same perception-action loop
• Why demand for inference compute is pushing models smaller and onto devices

Chapters:

(00:00) Pixels in, clicks out
 (01:37) Why most of the web will never get APIs
 (08:47) Aggregation, specialization, and human friction
 (11:39) Digital niches and specialized models
 (16:41) The web's heavy tail and where browser agents win
 (20:40) Inside Yutori's Navigator and Scouts
 (24:08) N1.5: writing JavaScript to cut trajectory length
 (27:45) Training on live websites
 (33:29) Open source: FAIR's legacy and the Chinese frontier
 (37:22) Agent frameworks: OpenClaw, Hermes, heartbeats
 (40:57) How non-technical users adopt agents
 (44:25) Smart glasses, robotics, and embodied AI
 (50:57) Compute demand and smaller on-device models
 (53:12) Why the company is called Yutori

Connect with Dhruv Batra:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhruv-batra-dbatra/
• X/Twitter: https://x.com/DhruvBatra_
• Yutori: https://yutori.com

Connect with Chain of Thought host Conor Bronsdon:

• Newsletter: https://newsletter.chainofthought.show/
• Twitter/X: https://x.com/ConorBronsdon
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorbronsdon/
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@ConorBronsdon

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