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

More episodes: https://chainofthought.show

Most of the Web Will Never Get APIs for AI Agents | Dhruv Batra

Chain of Thought | AI Agents, Infrastructure & Engineering

Most of the Web Will Never Get APIs for AI Agents | Dhruv Batra