alt Hacker NewsLike a lot of people in this thread I prototyped something similar. One experiment just connected GPT to a socket and gave it some bindings to SQLite.
With a system prompt like “you’re an http server for a twitter clone called Gwitter.” you can interact directly with the LLM from a browser.
Of course it was painfully slow, quickly went off the rails, and revealed that LLM’s are bad at business logic.
But something like this might be the future. And on a longer time horizon, mentioned by OP and separately by sama, it may be possible to render interactive apps as streaming video and bypass the browser stack entirely.
So I think we’re a the Mother of All Demos stage of things. These ideas are in the water but not really practical today. Similarly to MoaD, it may take another 25 years for them to come to fruition.
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There is no world where the technology that exists as we understand it leads to your techno dystopia in any way.
These models can’t even do continuous learning yet. There’s no evidence that the current tech will ever evolve beyond what it is today.
Not to mention that nobody is asking for any of this.
"The Mother of All Demos" was a showcase of an early generation of technology that existed and had a practical purpose. There was never a question if and how the technology would improve. It was only a matter of time and solid engineering.
On the other hand, improvements to "AI" of similar scales are very much uncertain. We have seen moderate improvements from brute force alone, i.e. by throwing more data and compute at the problem, but this strategy has reached diminishing returns, and we have been at a plateau for about a year now. We've seen improvements by applying better engineering (MCP, "agents", "skills", etc.), but have otherwise seen the same tech demos in search of a problem, with a bit more polish at every iteration.
There's no doubt that statistical models are a very useful technology with many applications, some of which we haven't discovered yet. But given the technology we have today, the claim that something like it could be used to generate interactive video which could be used instead of traditional software is absurd. This is not a matter of gradual iterations to get there—it would require foundational breakthroughs to work even remotely reliably, which is as uncertain as LLMs were 10 years ago.
In any case, whatever sama and his ilk have to say about this topic is hardly relevant. These people would say anything to keep the hype-driven valuation pump going.