AI as an Information Interface | Hacker News Reader

AI as an Information Interface

zeynepevecen.dev

29 pointszeynepevecen11 comments

The biggest hurdle I'm personally struggling with now as a software engineer trying to find the motivation to continue writing code and developing products isn't simply that AI is getting better and better at writing more complex code and doing more of my job for me (though it certainly doesn't help), but more importantly that it will soon do away with entire classes and categories of desktop, web, and mobile applications as the human interface evolves towards conversational, intent-driven interactions with AI.

Vast majority of all apps are just tables, forms, and JSON over the wire—I don't see that continuing to be the case for much longer.

That’s valid but in the bigger picture, our jobs will be evolved not seize to exist. I dont think that an average person will be able to interact with AI to build functional systems. At least not in the near future.

I expect MacOS to be first at implementing intents across apps, Windows to follow. Your app or website has no intent API? it is not going to play nice with the ecosystem. So you got to keep up

For me it's both, as well as the unknown unknowns over the next 5-10 years. There's a chance that everything changes so dramatically that it feels almost worthless to commit to anything. We need some kind of term for this AI malaise.

It’s a stochastic interface. That medium isn’t applicable for a wide variety of interfaces, so there is still very much a place for boring UI with JSON over the wire

With more capable models, reliable test time compute, and more sophisticated RAG (https://openai.com/index/openai-acquires-rockset/) I genuinely struggle to see meaningful use cases for traditional user interfaces.

AI is not just any one thing. In the grand view, looking ahead a hundred years, AI will seem like it embedded itself in everything everywhere all at once. AI will take the hardest effort to embed itself in lower-level high-efficiency systems such as the OS kernel, but even there, it makes its presence known by code generation.

Yes, AI as an information interface is still an underrated and underused idea despite us having seen it function over the past couple of years. The question then is, what's the best LLM driven frontend that could be an alternative to React or Django or Laravel, etc.? It would be used to serve a customer-facing application. In the simplest case, I think something like Streamlit or Gradio, or something in this class, could offer a conversational UI.

To add to the comment, going forward, in terms of UIs, it makes sense for them to be agents interacting with agents in a loose sense of what it means to be an agent.

Yep, and I would have been really excited about this if it wasn't that they're hidden away behind an internet required api that can be taken away from you with rate limits.

We went from CLIs to GUIs to touchscreens and we will see more and more of MCBs, multimodal chatbot, where the interaction is done by text, voice, maybe even other on the future. AI is just the “software” that enables those interfaces, not the interface per se.

Looking forward to the day when we refer to this interface as an example of psychotronics.

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