[pradn]

Your comment makes a lot of sense to me.

What I wonder though is - we've been a year and a half into the LLM craze and we still don't see a really good information processing system for them. Yes, there's chatbots, some that let you throw in images and PDFs.

But what we need is more like a ground-up rethink of these UIs. We need to invent the "desktop" of LLMs.

But the keys here, I think, are that

a) the LLMs are only part of the solution. A chat interface is immature and not enough.

b) external information is brought in by the user, and augmented by a universe of knowledge given by the provider

c) being overly general is probably a trap. Yes, LLMs can talk about everything - but why not solve a concrete vertical?

Semantic search helps with a part of this, but is just one component.

[bunderbunder]

Also, frankly, I don't think a chat interface is good UX. People are having fun with it right now because it's novel. But human-human interaction doesn't use natural language because it's somehow ideal; we rely on it due to hardware limitations. We don't have the same set of limitations in human-computer interaction. And we also have a lot of history (as in, literally all of history) demonstrating that, even when talking to each other, humans quickly start straying away from pure natural language interaction whenever their communication is modulated by a technology that allows for additional options.

You can even see some of this play out a bit over the course of the web's nearly 30 year history. 20 years ago, informational websites tended to be brief, highly structured, and minimally chatty. Nowadays, people produce walls of text that you have to dig through to find the actual content. Why the change? Search engine optimization. Which I'd argue is an example of essentially the same folks who give us AI basically dragging us back to a world where natural language dominates. Not because it's actually better for anyone, but because it's what they can more easily build a one-size-fits-all algorithm around.

[pradn]

Part of the reason why LLM summaries are so attractive IS a UI problem. The economics of the web has led to every publisher stuffing their websites with ads. No one wants that. Its much nicer to see a clean paragraph of text.

But we clearly have an ouroboros situation. If publishers lose views, they lose money and the ability to craft good information. Less new info to incorporate into LLMs.

LLM training over the internet corpus has really been a massive heist. Pulling a wool over publishers' heads, undercutting their business, hoarding the information.

But it's really unavoidable at this point. Everything has been democratized: compute on cloud platforms, data via Common Crawl, OSS algorithms and tool-kits. No one can put a stop to this, and there's powerful economic incentives to actually get some benefit out of the hundreds of billions that have been poured in already.