XDA Developers reports: On July 22, a Google DeepMind engineer, Vidy Thatte, shared a snippet of a browser he built that "treats every URL as a prompt and generates a site from scratch" on his X account. Just a few days later, he shared a TestFlight link to let iPhone users try it for themselves. The browser he launched is called Gem, and it's a browser that doesn't really...browse. Instead of fetching a webpage from a server the way Chrome or Safari would, Gem hands whatever URL you type over to Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite model and asks it to generate a webpage on the spot. If you enter a real address, it builds its own interpretation of that site rather than the actual thing. If you enter an address that doesn't exist, Gemini simply invents a website to fill the gap. In other words, you're not visiting the internet so much as browsing one the model dreams up as you go... Thatte's reasoning was that with a model as fast and cheap as Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite, there's almost no practical difference anymore between a website and generating a brand-new one on the fly... Given that this tool is powered by Gemini 3.5 Flash Lite and it's just a side project rather than a full-fledged tool, it doesn't come with Gemini access baked in. Gem requires you to bring your own Gemini API key to get it working. Every URL you enter fires off a request to the model, so Gem needs a key linked to your Google account to actually generate anything, with the usage billed to you. You can grab a key for free from Google AI Studio, paste it into Gem's settings, and you're ready to start typing URLs. While you can get started for free, I ran into the limits within two minutes of playing around. So, I did need to enable billing on my API key and decided to load $10 into it. While the blogger's own site seemed to only get the Gemini logo, tapping it revealed nearly two dozen remixing options. (Dark mode, Reader, Neubrutalist, Broadsheet, Blueprint, Comic book, Punk zine, Notebook, Chalkboard, Receipt, Teletext, System 7, Wes Anderson, Cyber neon, Clay, Frosted, Geocities, Matrix, Museum, Windows 95, Terminal, Vaporwave, and Hide images...) "The frontend morphed before my eyes. Every new edit took practically no time to load, and within a second or two, the same XDA articles would reappear wearing a completely different skin..." For another site, it kept the article headlines, but then rewrote all the text! And after entering an address they knew didn't exist — their own name — in two seconds the browser whipped up a slick portfolio "genuinely been better than some of what those tools produced with far more time and context to work with." But its link to a LinkedIn profile led to a lookalike page, because Gem "had simply generated its own version of it, complete with a made-up follower number and details I never wrote...."Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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