The entire universe as an adaptive interface

A friend of the list shared this excellent perspective with me the other day: “AI isn’t the app, it’s the UI”.

It’s a great perspective on how to think about generative AI with respect to a product or productized services business.

(Sidebar: The title of the article alone lets you start to unpack it mentally before you dig into it. I love that quality in a title).

If you could make an article heat map, this sentence would be a fire-red:

The startups that come out on top of the AI hype wave will be those that understand generative AI’s place in the world: not just catnip for venture capitalists and early adopters, not a cheap full-service replacement for human writers and artists, and certainly not a shortcut to mission-critical code, but something even more interesting: an adaptive interface between chaotic real-world problems and secure, well-architected technical solutions. 

The chaotic real world problems – that’s what we bring. We also bring chaotic solutions embedded in our natural way of speaking, which proceeds from our equallty chaotic way of thinking, as Stephen Wolfram has been hammering on in his recent podcast tour.

When an LLM is created, we expose it to enormous amounts of our chaotic minds.

In some cases (ChatGPT for instance, but not Claude), we also expose it to our public attempts to control technical solutions, like  web programming languages or operating systems. Its understanding of how we do that is where the UI opportunity lies: “adaptive interfaces”.

Imagine a hammer that changes shape based on the hand that holds it; that’s the UI that we have the potential of crafting, except instead of a hammer, it’s just words that change.. or is it?