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by eddythompson80 331 days ago
Maybe the problem in framing AI as an interface is that there isn't that much money in an "interface" is there?

Like there is no money in "GUI". There is a lot of work that each company wanting to build a good GUI app needs to put into their particular app. And the more specialized the app, the more custom and potentially complex and expensive that will be. But there are no "GUI companies", unless you count Microsoft and Apple as GUI companies.
2 comments
throw234234234 331 days ago
I don't know. Interfaces are the part that most people non-tech generally understand. Most products to most people are "interfaces" after all whether it is a website/app/OS/etc. Interfaces to enable workflows pretty much summarises most tech products, and access to selective data from those interfaces.

My view is that AI, even if it is like a human, shares some of the weaknesses of a human in that it needs to be selective about relevant information. Frontends/UIs generally do this as well for specific use cases/workflows - there's a limit of what you can display on a screen after all. UI's aren't big data (humans can only see a couple of screens worth of summarized data to be useful).

This IMO at least in the short term affects the design of AI applications in general as well.

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andyferris 331 days ago
Well… that’s not a bad analogy actually. Those companies became huge due to their GUI platforms - there was money there at the time.

OpenAI & Anthropic would like to become huge on their “AI-UI” platforms.

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eddythompson80 331 days ago
Nope, Microsoft and Apple didn’t just sell GUI. They built an entire solution for a problem around GUI. And even then, they made their money elsewhere. Apple on hardware and Microsoft on enterprise licensing of a full end to end stack of almost everything a person would need. They did so much they got sued for antitrust because of how many fucking pies they were trying to shove themselves in. To call Microsoft and Apple success as “GUI companies” means that you would have no idea what an AI company is. Certainly it won’t be ones developing the basic platform then.

Companies selling GUI toolkits in the 90s are all dead. No company made money on selling “GUI” as a technology. No one called Microsoft and Apple “the GUI companies”

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