I don't think it's that anyone wants the interface to be chat. I think it's that the underlying technology is inherently words in and words out. It's similar to how devices with capacitive screens are most naturally going to support tapping, dragging, and pinching.

The great confusion for Anthropic and OAI is how to break out from pure chat without signalling you in fact intend to eat all of your customer's business too.

We’re working on this problem at my company. All of our competitors have churned out a bunch of generic chat based agents (basic harness with a few tools connected and different system prompts) to do basic stuff you’d used to do from a wizard or even just a couple of buttons in a form. We’re steering away from this by building full ‘surface’ agents with A2UI and an initial surface message. The users just see a normal looking web application but under the hood it’s all driven by a harness. UI updates are effectively just new events received by the client. Events are either generated by an LLM directly, or deterministically - it’s up to the dev.

IMO no one knows what LLMs are capable of yet and the goal post keeping moving every few months that building any specific UIs right now risks rendering them obsolete or too slow.

e.g. We went from somewhat smarter code autocomplete, to asking chatgpt copy paste, to cli agent running inside your project, managing session, to GUI to manage that, to projects where you talk to a "Chief of Staff" agent that manages other sessions, to who knows what's next.

I think the right interfaces for LLMs right now need to be very simple and easy to change/evolve. And chat still seems to be the best default solution.

This has been my ongoing gripe. Someone put chat in front of a transformer model. It exploded like all prior versions of “AI chat” did. Now what?

The moment someone figures out a new modality for LLMs is when we’ll see the next hockey stick.

It’s not surprising.

Technology folks don’t really understand people and what they need.

This always happens. This is why woz needed Steve.

Steve Jobs is sorely missed tbh. For all the shit he got - he was a true visionary. He lived at the intersection of technology and the humanities… he kept preaching this. And now we are seeing why.

Chat is only tedious because it’s slow. If models responded in 300ms it would be the ideal interface.

One thing I would like is a tree-like chat structure like reddit / HN. Many times I abandon the direction things have gone but would like to resume at some ancestor or sibling response.

Do you know that you can have multiple chats at the same time?

Before OpenAI dropped ChatGPT, nobody knew chat would be such a hit. Several labs had versions of these things, Google engineers were getting finessed by a rudimentary model just like in the movie Ex Machina that came out 10 years prior which was satirizing Google

But I don't agree that they aren't product-ized. There are many applications doing calls to LLMs behind the scenes and are hits, leveraging structured data very heavily and not having conversations with users at all. I would say that there is a predictable scope creep from executives to surface a conversational aspect though. We need to bring representation to that so we can point to some other best practice to push back

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