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Comment by mhl47 | Hacker News Reader

There was a recent post here about how deeply ingrained the chat interface is in OpenAIs organization. This really doubles down on that, but does anyone really like to interact with so much language instead of visual elements? Also feels horrible that you are supposed to remember a bunch of app names like "zillow" and punch them in the chat. And like an opportunity for them to slowly introduce ads for this apps or "preferential discovery", if you will, as monetization strategy.

Personally I don't hope thats the future.

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I feel like we're rehashing the debate around whether or not a GUI or terminal is more powerful.

For a large number of tasks that cleanly generalize into a stream of tokens, command line or chat is probably superior. We'll get some affordances like tab auto completion to help remember the name of certain bots or mCP endpoints that can be brought in as needed...

But for anything that involves discovery, graphical interaction feels more intuitive and we'll probably get bespoke interfaces relevant to that particular task at hand with some sort of partially hidden layers to abstract away the token stream?

Very much agreed. I think the dominance of the chat interface to LLMs has materially impaired the general usefulness of these tools — the sooner it goes away the better. It’s almost impossible to explain to a non-engineer how the illusion of a continuous conversation is crafted through context management and why past moments in a conversation might fall out of memory. My general advice to non-technical friends is to create a new conversation for each prompt so that they can get a more deterministic sense of how to formulate instructions and which are successful.

I was really hoping Apple would make some innovations on the UX side, but they certainly haven’t yet.

counterpoint: a lot of people around me just type "zillow" in google to access it, so maybe it's not absurd to refer to it by name in a chat interface

Right, but if you just search for "house listings" you find zillow and redfin and other stuff. Becoming the new word for "listings" will tie specific brands to our use of language in very interesting ways. What happens if I register my app to a common word. In this example, can I take "listings" and astroturf my app to the top? Is this a new DNS "buying all the domains" race?

I mean ultimately you’re in OpenAI’s world, they have even more innate control of language, meaning, and truth

Sam specifically mentioned apps would go through a vetting process before they were auto-suggested by the chat. So, at least in the early days, I would imagine some of the basic shenanigans will be prevented.

Talking about monetization strategy, there is a world where we would not have to remember "Zillow" or "Spotify", and instead ask for real state or music related actions, and have OpenAI "decide" for us what is "the best" options... As in "the option that paid the most to get promoted".

Which post was that?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44573195 (in the article, search for:"Chat runs really deep")

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