alt Hacker NewsThe argument seems to be that having a corporation restrict your ability to present arbitrary text directly to the model and only being able to go through their abstract interface which will integrate your text into theirs (hopefully) is more productive than fully controlling the input text to a model. I don't think that's true generally. I think it can be true when you're talking about non-technical users like the article is.
The use of specialization of interfaces is apparent if you compare Photoshop with Gemini Pro/Nano Banana for targeted image editing.
I can select exactly where I want changes and have targeted element removal in Photoshop. If I submit the image and try to describe my desired changes textually, I get less easily-controllable output. (And I might still get scrambled text, for instance, in parts of the image that it didn't even need to touch.)
I think this sort of task-specific specialization will have a long future, hard to imagine pure-text once again being the dominant information transfer method for 90% of the things we do with computers after 40 years of building specialized non-text interfaces.