Four Layers

Notes:

Every new technology tends to grow four layers: capabilities, interfaces, frameworks, and applications.

There does not seem to be a way of skipping or short-cutting around this process. As technologies grow through these stages, they become more accessible to wider audiences. Understanding how these four layers emerge can help in growing a durable and successful business.

1. The first layer, Capabilities, refers to the time when a new technological capability spends time waiting for its power to become accessible.

2. The second layer, Interfaces, emerges on top of the capability and can be an API or any other form of simplifying contract that enables more people to use the technology. The Interfaces layer serves as the democratizer of the Capabilities layer.

3. Third layer, the Frameworks, focuses on utility and asks how the underlying Interfaces layer can be utilized in more effective ways and made even more accessible to an even broader audience. The Frameworks layer tends to be the most opinionated of the stack due to the many definitions of utility and many possible ways to achieve it. The diversity of opinion introduced in the Frameworks layer depends on two factors: the inherent value of the capability and the own opinion of the Interfaces layer. The Frameworks layer becomes the de-facto place where best practices and patterns of applying the capability are developed and stored.

4. Fourth layer, Applications, is where the technology finally faces its users – the consumers of the technological capability. These consumers might be end users who aren’t technology-savvy or another group of developers who are relieved to not have to think about how the technology works on the inside. The pressure toward maximizing utility develops at this layer. Consumer-grade software is serious business and it often takes all available capacity to just stay in the game. The whole reason the Frameworks layer exists is to unlock efficiency and further scale the availability of the technology.

This is exactly what is playing out with the large language models. While ChatGPT is getting all the attention, the actual interesting work is happening at the Frameworks layer that sits on top of the large language model Interfaces layer: the OpenAI, Anthropic, and PaLM APIs.