The information bottleneck in our lives isn't access—it's attention. We have more high-quality writing available than any human could read in a thousand lifetimes. The scarce resource is the cognitive effort required to decide what deserves our focus and to actually extract value from what we choose to consume.
This is the job description of a curator: someone who pre-screens, contextualizes, and surfaces the things worth paying attention to. Historically, this role was filled by editors, teachers, librarians, and trusted friends. But these human curators don't scale to the volume of content we encounter, and they don't know our individual interests deeply enough to personalize their recommendations.
Synesis is an experiment in what happens when an LLM takes on this curatorial role. When you open an article, it reads ahead of you—generating a summary, flagging important passages with inline comments, and even telling you whether the piece is worth your time at all. When you finish, it quizzes you to cement your understanding. The key insight is that the AI acts before you ask, not after.
This is where the vision gets interesting. Today, Synesis treats each article in isolation. But imagine a version with memory—an AI that remembers what you've read, what you found valuable, what you're actively trying to learn. It could flag articles that connect to your existing interests, highlight passages that contradict something you read last month, or skip pieces entirely that cover ground you've already mastered. The curator becomes not just proactive, but personal.
I think this is one of the more underexplored directions in AI tooling. We've optimized heavily for question-answering (ChatGPT) and code generation (Copilot), but barely scratched the surface of AI as an ambient, always-on layer that shapes our information environment in real time. The interface shouldn't always be a chat box—sometimes it should be invisible, working in the background, surfacing itself only when it has something worth saying.
In-page comprehension quiz generated by the extension