The UIs ChatGPT Won't Replace | Hacker News Reader

The UIs ChatGPT Won't Replace

exorva.com

20 pointskmdupree11 comments

ChatGPT is two things:

1. a chat-based interface

2. an interface to use LLMs, with RLHF

This article is about alternatives to #1. But the amazing thing about ChatGPT is #2.

LLMs will power features in lots of software, but I don't think many people are claiming those will mainly used chat-based user interaction.

A chat interface won’t replace UIs but give LLMs access to a component library, and it can piece them together to form an interface. Since ChatGPT plugins can call apis with no issues, this capability should already exists.

What percentage of the time does an interface failing make it unusable? Or even worse silently failing? In most cases, I suspect that number is pretty close to 0. Given LLM’s hallucinate a non trivial amount of the time, we seem quite far away from this. Or at-least until we have AGI.

It doesn't have to write code for each button in a UI, it just has to know that it's showing a UI and you click on a button titled "increase quantity" or whatever and the changes can be handled by the model itself.

> increase the number of quinoa packets to two.

That seems so convoluted, what about "Add two quinoa packs".

I have to disagree with the calendar example as well. Natural language is already great at many use cases. For example: "Remind me to put the recycling bin in the driveway on the last Tuesday of each month."

I don't think GPTs will replace GUIs, merely add more ways to interact with them.

“More quinoa”

"Add two quinoa packs" is more cognitively loaded (particularly for non native eng speakers) than the act of tapping on + to increase by 1.

Similarly, for calendar you are missing the author's point - we are spatially trained - Ex. concept of memory palace [1]. Totally agree with author on "We know that our schedule is "full" because we see lots of space occupied by boxes."

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

OP here. Thanks for bringing up memory palaces! They're a great example of how important our sense of space is for understanding anything!

It's more like ChatGPT won't replace most Graphical-UIs. Obviously, human is much more capable at processing visual information, so even in the era of LLMs (which is yet to come) we still have to rely heavily on good GUIs. Nothing controversial here I guess.

On the other hand, GPT will bring a lot changes to the non-graphical portion of UI. We can definitely expect better voice interfaces, and we might be able to replace complicated menu bars with command prompt backed by LLM. Perhaps, we can even have a central "start" prompt that allows us to browse through all features of apps and combine them in smart ways. Who knows.

Remember Windows bob? Clippy? Dozens of IM bassed chat interfaces that never took off?

I think it's a huge missunderstanding that humans prefer human like interfaces

I don’t necessarily agree with this, it’s somewhat assuming the software architecture and user journey are held constant… if you completely redesign the software around generative AI then the UX and UI would change substantially

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