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by fshbbdssbbgdd 883 days ago
I think many parts of the architecture can be reused - in Alexa terms, all of the “skills” that integrate the assistant with various other services. IMO one of the main problems with assistants is that I don’t know what skills are available or how to invoke them. It’s like I’m a wizard who has to memorize all the spells I could be casting. It never happens because I don’t care enough. I think LLM’s could potentially help my making it easier to discover and invoke those skills.
2 comments

This "spells" is such a great way to explain how it feels to me to use these assistants. I'll play with one if I'm at a friend's house, but honestly can't see the appeal. Telling Google to change the color of the lighting or brightness just seems like something that is mostly a gimmick unless you're maybe disabled and then it may be a big quality of life improvement. The other stuff doubly so.

With ChatGPT I can see the appeal for certain tasks like having it create a custom text adventure for you, but I can't see it being too useful in my day to day life yet.

"Skills" will be obsolete very soon. AI agents will use the same software tools and services that humans do. They won't need special separate AI-only interfaces.

I'm not excited about the Rabbit R1 as a hardware device but their software vision is exactly right and there are new startups coming out of stealth seemingly every day now attacking this problem.

Skills are just APIs that conform to a similar look. We'll definitely continue to have AI-only or developed-for-AI APIs for future "agents" to act against. They probably won't spend much effort formatting text to sound good to a person, but the infrastructure is here.
I disagree. These special APIs will not have the breadth of capabilities that the human UI does, so AIs will use the human UIs out of necessity. But I think in the long term we will eventually see a simplification of UIs. As it becomes less common for humans to actually use them, they will no longer need fancy animations or dark mode or client-side validation or pretty styling. In the extreme, a return to plain HTML forms that a human can use in a pinch but are mostly used by AI agents. At that point I guess you're blurring the lines between UI and API.
Isn't it the exact opposite? Interfaces we use every day can be dead simple, all they need is that they don't change behind our back. The accelerator pedal does not come with a footover pop-up "keep pressed to make car go". Interfaces we use once in a leap year on the other hand, that's where we need all the hand-holding we can get.