Proactive Agents for the Web with Devi Parikh

Today, we're joined by Devi Parikh, co-founder and co-CEO of Yutori, to discuss browser use models and a future where we interact with the web through proactive, autonomous agents. We explore the technical challenges of creating reliable web agents, the advantages of visually-grounded models that operate on screenshots rather than the browser’s more brittle document object model, or DOM, and why this counterintuitive choice has proven far more robust and generalizable for handling complex web interfaces. Devi also shares insights into Yutori’s training pipeline, which has evolved from supervised fine-tuning to include rejection sampling and reinforcement learning. Finally, we discuss how Yutori’s “Scouts” agents orchestrate multiple tools and sub-agents to handle complex queries, the importance of background, "ambient" operation for these systems, and what the path looks like from simple monitoring to full task automation on the web. The complete show notes for this episode can be found at https://twimlai.com/go/756.