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Comment by giancarlostoro | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a fan of OpenAI / Sam Altman, but I love their blog posts. The team and whoever decides how to do these presentations, is on point. The only other company that has amazing release pages like this is Apple, I think I remember hearing that they probably hired someone from apple who used to do release blog posts there too.

What's funny about "Intelligent UI" is I said like 2 or more years ago, that these AI companies need to start thinking outside of these basic chat UIs, they do some things here and there, but its really depressing how little they do to innovate in these spaces. Same with the coding harnesses, the UI for all these things could be drastically superior.

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Apple should be extremely worried about the AI companies making big improvements in UX. This work by OpenAI is a step in that direction.

If the main user paradigm becomes a chat interface conjuring whatever UI elements needed to best accomplish the task at hand, the entire paradigm of OS, UI frameworks, apps from an App Store to accomplish specific tasks, all come into question.

I keep thinking that Steve Jobs would have been all over the UX ramifications of LLMs and demanding that Apple lead in that area.

Steve Jobs wasn’t meant for this era, but his instincts would have been interesting to see in the AI landscape. He was an artisanal designer though, and our current era is always for the investor’s bottom line.

"I keep thinking that Steve Jobs would have been all over the UX ramifications of LLMs and demanding that Apple lead in that area."

Oh give it a rest. Lol who are you compared with the management of Apple?

This preachy stuff is ridiculous. So far Apple have been correct to stay out the LLM space.

Define "correct" first.

Apple absolutely messed-up by abandoning OpenCL's early ML research efforts to oppose a CUDA monopoly. They messed up a second time shipping a raster GPU with Apple Silicon when CUDA and Tegra had proven that GPGPU was mobile-ready. Then when the ARM datacenter had it's moment, Nvidia's Grace ARM CPU displaced billions of dollars in sales that would have been Apple's if they didn't mess up the fastest CPU in the world with macOS. Then they depreciated the Mac Pro, which seems like a mistake since it had the potential to outsell Nvidia's ARM datacenter chips if it ran Linux. According to the rumor mill, Apple's M8 chip will finally be the one that takes GPGPU seriously, after a decade of Apple's innovative ship-second mentality.

Apple's management isn't infallible whatsoever. Many of them are petty, blinded by politics and/or obsessed with their legacy more than they care about profits or quality products.

It's not something that gets talked about a lot yet, but I've a feeling that this is where the biggest disruption for the entrenched and geriatric operating systems is going to come from:

OS on Demand

> probably hired someone from apple

Fairly likely: https://medium.com/the-engineering-brief/openai-hired-400-ap...

You could say the same thing about Anthropic because I don't really see much differences. Not sure about amazing part but both are high quality and I probably like Anthropic's aesthetic more

Anthropic's aesthetic looks good by pre-AI design standards, but it's so overused now that I find it off-putting. It's like the 2026 equivalent of the Twitter bootstrap CSS from 15 years ago.

I feel like today's tailwind is the spiritual equivalent to last decade's bootstrap. Except that last decade's bootstrap webpages have a human behind them who usually put thought and effort into making the page useful and correct, whereas today's tailwind pages are often vibe coded slop with all the associated issues.

Bootstrap stands the test of time! I use it as my go-to unless I have a reason otherwise.

I don’t find this criticism to be very actionable.

What changes could they make to really improve the usability of their products?

I don't care if Anthropic keeps using it, it's part of their brand at this point. The thousands of other developers using Claude Code to generate designs should not just accept the default output, which looks very Anthropic-ish, and actually put some effort into polishing and differentiating their product. It has nothing to do with usability and everything to do with a basic sense of good taste and aesthetics.

> these AI companies need to start thinking outside of these basic chat UIs, they do some things here and there, but its really depressing how little they do to innovate in these spaces. Same with the coding harnesses, the UI for all these things could be drastically superior.

I would prefer if the AI companies stuck to just creating better models and making them as cheap and accessible as possible. Let others build the products. I don't want 1-2 companies to own every product in the world.

> I don't want 1-2 companies to own every product in the world.

That seems to be the plan...

That’s the plan for … capitalism

Buckle up boys

Nothing new.

Look at the history of Microsoft.

That was the objection to Microsoft controlling both the dominant OS and the most popular productivity applications running on that OS. Took the web then mobile devices to really shake that up.

Technically other companies do, and I lump them in when I say "these AI companies" I am talking about any company that makes and builds any AI harness, coding or otherwise, I have not seen any innovating in the areas of the UI / UX of using these chat models in a meaningful way.

Unfortunately, the endgame of AI is to own the only product in the world.

Why did they bother hiring someone to write at all? I certainly wouldn't invest $1T into a company with so little confidence in their product. When the chips are down and they need to write something important, they DON'T use AI?

That's just picking a fight. Whatever we think about how amazing or terrible AI is, it's pretty reasonable to understand it is quite literally the weighted average of humanity's output.

Also reasonable: it's possible to hire a world-class ___ to do that job better than AI.

It's not a weighted average though. I see this repeated all the time. Between synthetic data, custom produced training data by experts, post-training regimes etc the models are far more diverged from that baseline at this point, at this point it's mostly a right shifted curve.

I hesitated to write that line because I don't know the math. So thanks for clarifying. Main point is the output is along some distribution and I'd say AI-evangelist themselves see "good enough" across everything and anything as a feature.

Obviously everyone at Anthropic uses a ton of AI in everything. The point here is that they clearly use it well, and that they use it as a tool to augment and enhance what they do rather than as a replacement for effort. The blog posts don't read like the output of a prompt because they're probably the output of dozens of prompts, rewritten and edited, by someone who's using AI to actually write something worth reading.

Anyone can having blog posts as good as this by using AI. Just not by zero-shotting it with a 2 line prompt. It still takes a lot of work.

Do you also demand that McDonald’s employees only eat McDonald’s?

They use their product to do what it’s best at, and use humans where it isn’t yet good enough.

Mate this is like half a prompt of GPT-6

"The apocalypse will be televised"

I take the opposite viewpoint. I think pages like these are horrible, and a demonstration that web designers have too many tools at their disposal.

But this is just a marketing page for some tech company, right? If only it stopped there. I have to deal with this nonsense in news "articles" as well on occasion, when some web designer intern is allowed to larp as a journalist for a day.

sigh Just give me text to read.

Sometimes you want more than text. This is one of the interesting divides these days - and I say this as someone who spends a lot of time in the terminal. Computer interfaces and interaction did not peak with the VT-100. Sometimes, there is a very legitimate need to show tables, graphics, interesting graphs, and to use colour and shade to draw the eye and lead someone through an experience.

This is why I use an IDE instead of a TUI agent... I'm on a computer with a multi-megapixel display, I want to use it. If I could be driving the same process with my Macintosh SE as a serial terminal, what the hell is the point of my recent Macbook?

You say tables, graphics, graphs, and colors, but I mean things that move when they don't need to move and interfere with expected UI behaviour, like arbitrarily staying in one position when I am using my mouse wheel to scroll downwards.

I should have been more precise than saying "just give me text", but it was what came in to mind when I wrote it, as I was thinking about what an article is meant to contain as its base element.

I'm pretty sure you can just ask chatgpt to add to its memory "Just give me text to read."

The text-only purists on HN are getting very tiresome. It’s seriously in every fucking post that links to a site with JavaScript enabled. We get it. You’re elite. Now stop talking about it.

I think the point is not how good this blog post is as if it was written by a human, but that this blog post is entirely generated by the GPT-6 model.

So this is a taste of the slop that's going to invade everywhere in a few months.

I don't know. This is an amateur page with a bad AI video and chaotic presentation. It is ten levels below Apple announcements.

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