The AI-fixated tech industry is rapidly dismantling the old web, with no game plan for how to replace it.

State of play: Chatbots have already begun to intercept web traffic and drain publishers' revenue. Now tech giants and startups aim to remodel the devices and browsers we use to access web pages, using AI to summarize or pre-empt the content that people and publishers post online.

Driving the news: Tech circles were abuzz over the past week with news from the normally sedate browser world — the software category that has been shaping access to digital information since the '90s.

• Firefox last week debuted an experimental browser tool that provides AI summaries when users hover over links.
• Also last week, The Browser Company, maker of the Arc browser that's beloved by some power users, announced it was pivoting to focus on a new AI-powered browser called Dia.
• OpenAI has long been rumored to be working on its own browser, but has yet to ship anything.

Over the last two years Google, which customarily casts itself as champion of the open web, has steadily increased the prominence of its AI summaries in every aspect of search.

• At Google's I/O developer conference last year it announced the U.S.-wide rollout of the AI summaries, which sit on top of search results and allow users to get their answers without clicking through to source pages (while also sometimes providing made-up facts).
• At this year's I/O, the company said that AI Mode, which turns a user's search into an AI chat conversation, would now be a standard feature — although some early reviews have found its information unreliable.

Meanwhile, OpenAI made headlines with its announcement that it was purchasing Apple designer Jony Ive's AI device startup.

• Ive will now spearhead OpenAI's plan to sell new, non-smartphone gadgets that could bring generative AI answers more thoroughly into users' everyday lives.

What they're saying: "Increasingly, web pages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces," Browser Company CEO Josh Miller wrote to explain why his firm was stopping further work on Arc.

Yes, but: As tech goes all in on rebuilding our web experiences with AI, there's no guarantee that the web will still be there when that job is done.

• With chatbots becoming users' default way to find out what's happening in the world, their makers pretend they can plaster this new interface layer over the internet without disrupting the data sources that feed it.
• But some media observers believe an AI-first web will choke off the money and attention that motivates web creators to keep extending the common knowledge pool.
• Many publishers are already seeing significant traffic and income declines from the shift toward AI search, though Google disputes there's a connection. And creative artists fear their work is being stolen or devalued.

This is everyone's problem. Of course the businesses and people that have built their work around the web are afraid — but AI makers should be worried, too.

• The web's vast treasury (and cesspool) of human creative work has accumulated since the 1990s because people wanted to share what they know either for financial or reputational gain, or just to advance a cause or do some good. That setup gave us everything from Wikipedia and YouTube tutorials to blogs and Reddit.
• Nearly all of the old-school web has already been fed into AI training databases for regurgitation by bots like ChatGPT. From now on, valuable new contributions will likely sit behind paywalls or depend on unsteady alternate means of support (membership programs, nonprofit grants, government funding).
• If AI undermines the incentives for human beings to update the web with their news, opinions and arguments, it will also cut off its own future.

The intrigue: Some in the web avant-garde are already anticipating a world in which the most ambitious or meaningful creative work takes place in what they're calling a "dark forest" web.

• They imagine creative communities that are purposefully isolated from the Silicon Valley bazaar, generating "anti-memes" and critical ideas without participating in social media's algorithmic competition or AI's sloppy reductivism.

The other side: AI firms have introduced modest efforts to feed money back to content providers. OpenAI, for instance, has made multiple deals with online publishers (including Axios).

• But it's hard to see how that kind of arrangement replaces the search traffic and ad revenue that's been the sustaining anchor for so many web publishers for the past decade.

The bottom line: Google shaped a search-based web on which independent publishers and individual contributors could survive, if not always thrive. Now AI is ready to turn that entire ecosystem into a legacy product.

Disclosure: Axios and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access part of Axios' story archives while helping fund the launch of Axios into four local cities and providing some AI tools. Axios has editorial independence.

Former Microsoft and BP execs are launching a startup to quickly deploy data centers with on-site power — and very high efficiency.

Why it matters: Rapidly building and powering data centers — and doing it without straining grids or spiking emissions — is key to the global AI race.

Driving the news: The startup GridFree AI emerges from stealth today with $5 million led by Giant Ventures.

• Its modular, off-grid "power foundry" concept integrates gas power, battery storage, and cooling with computing infrastructure.
• It's "systematic, repeatable, and becomes a manufacturing process, not a stick-built process," GridFree AI co-founder and executive chairman Ralph Alexander told Axios.

The big picture: Time is money. The tech "dramatically" cuts development timelines, the company said, enabling tech companies to accelerate revenue generation.

• They envision additive units to match various computing needs and their growth, with multiple gigawatts of scale possible.
• Alexander compares it to a "Lego set that you just continue to connect."

Reality check: Building and deploying new hard tech is really tough. And competition is intense, with lots of deep pockets and big brains trying to crack the data center energy code.

• America's government and technology giants are combining forces in what Axios' Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen call "The Great Fusing," aiming to outpace global competitors in the AI race. (Axios)
• Major record companies are now reportedly working to establish a payment framework with the AI music startups they previously sued for copyright infringement. (Bloomberg)
• Mary Meeker, the famed internet analyst turned venture capitalist, talked with Axios' Dan Primack about her first trends report since 2019, focused on the AI revolution. (Axios)
• The judge in the Google search antitrust case repeatedly pressed both sides on how AI could reshape the future of online search and competition. (Axios)
• Meta plans to use AI to automate most privacy and safety reviews of new product features. (NPR)

The classic Space Cadet pinball game that used to be part of Windows is now available as an Android app.