In all seriousness, his lovingly and expertly crafted explainers are still going to age like a handcrafted heirloom clock in a world of plastic-clad quartz movements. But it’s absolutely incredible that we are now in an age where a computer can manufacture a serviceable interactive explainer on whatever niche topic you desire.
> So too, is his turn to be relegated to a relic of his time.
No, it'll be tasteful artifact, not a relic. Records, fountain pens and automatic watches did not die. They are used by people who discern things, and no, none of these things have to be expensive (i.e. Neither Seiko 5, nor Lamy Safari are expensive, yet they are as dependable as their 100x expensive brethren).
Human touch still has that finesse and warmth.
On the front page right now - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49980626
OTOH, I still believe the exploded view on https://ciechanow.ski/mechanical-watch/ is something else.
For one, it has real physics on the weight, and second it always shows the correct/current time.
FWIW, his all animations has proper physics to begin with.
The entry you posted is nice, but Ciechanowski is still peerless.
You call it serviceable, but what purpose does this service? What do you now know about 7-speed bicycles that you didn't know before?
To that front - model providers generating visualization elements (i,e taking over the tools for interaction and visualization) is just a natural next step in value capture.
Anthropic launched docs, presentations, sites and am sure they have sheets next up their alley. Apps are artifacts. Tool forming is a natural model adjacency.
I've been learning music lately and it kept re-pasting the same one chord visualization throughout many conversations, almost randomly and often barely related to the question. So I at least hope this won't be as aggressive so I can prompt it away!
What's funny about "Intelligent UI" is I said like 2 or more years ago, that these AI companies need to start thinking outside of these basic chat UIs, they do some things here and there, but its really depressing how little they do to innovate in these spaces. Same with the coding harnesses, the UI for all these things could be drastically superior.
If the main user paradigm becomes a chat interface conjuring whatever UI elements needed to best accomplish the task at hand, the entire paradigm of OS, UI frameworks, apps from an App Store to accomplish specific tasks, all come into question.
I keep thinking that Steve Jobs would have been all over the UX ramifications of LLMs and demanding that Apple lead in that area.
Fairly likely: https://medium.com/the-engineering-brief/openai-hired-400-ap...
What changes could they make to really improve the usability of their products?
I would prefer if the AI companies stuck to just creating better models and making them as cheap and accessible as possible. Let others build the products. I don't want 1-2 companies to own every product in the world.
That seems to be the plan...
Buckle up boys
Anyone can having blog posts as good as this by using AI. Just not by zero-shotting it with a 2 line prompt. It still takes a lot of work.
Also reasonable: it's possible to hire a world-class ___ to do that job better than AI.
But this is just a marketing page for some tech company, right? If only it stopped there. I have to deal with this nonsense in news "articles" as well on occasion, when some web designer intern is allowed to larp as a journalist for a day.
sigh Just give me text to read.
This is why I use an IDE instead of a TUI agent... I'm on a computer with a multi-megapixel display, I want to use it. If I could be driving the same process with my Macintosh SE as a serial terminal, what the hell is the point of my recent Macbook?
I should have been more precise than saying "just give me text", but it was what came in to mind when I wrote it, as I was thinking about what an article is meant to contain as its base element.
- Audio volume has 2 levels: on and off
- Play button worked exactly once for me: it played and looped the video. Couldn't be stopped afterwards.
- The video progress bar has no visual indication of where it starts and where it ends..
Is this what Phind died for?
Sure as hell beats stupid Instagram style videos where you have no way to skip ahead. I think this is what future video is going be like, buckle up.
Even TV channels like CNN and FoxNews don't have a decent one.
It's like we need ASI to have a proper embedded video player. The ultimate software challenge.
I actually do think generating UI has some future, but I remain sceptical it can realistically go as far as promoters claim. It is especially bizarre to me when this is done by ostensibly UX people.
I have explicit instructions to tone it down. Less taglines, eyebrow text, subheadings, decorative spacing, pills, cards.
Hopefully this doesn't bleed into the chat...
I eventually just had it make a skill for work mode that would build a mini checklist app, but it was slow and felt janky needing to remember to switch to work mode.
This is already such a huge improvement.
1) I want a quick answer, and I don't care for the boilerplate UI. For example, if I ask how to make pancakes, I make them all the time and just want to a quick reminder on the ratios, but it might trigger a full UI that I need to sort through to find information.
2) If I ask a to me unrelated to UI question and it triggers a big UI build that is completely off topic for my question (meaning I'm desperately pressing the stop button and prepping rewriting my query)
Or the other one I see, for example if I look up a unix command like:
"ls all hidden files in the /xxx directory"
And I get back:
"Sorry, I am am unable to find /xxx in my current environment"
Getting a UI that explains the parts of a bike is ok I guess, but isn't it simpler to get an actual breakdown? Google "parts of bicycle breakout" gets tons of useful images instantly.
Getting a specialized app to split a bill? It was already trivial to put in a calculator if we cared to go item by item on the bill. Having to provide names and tag every item as I go is just more work. Usually real people just go $total divide by 5, I had more, let me chip in an extra $10.
Same with booking travel and wedding plans, these aren't things people would even delegate to a trusted friend usually, much less a one-off request to an AI bot or custom UI.
Most of the useful tasks it can do right now are research, technical question/answer, coding. In terms of "build a flexible ui that solves real-world problem", if existing mobile app isn't useful in this arena, then its unlikely a completely custom UI will do the job.
That said, I've done a few small ones like a quick one to practice alphabet of a foreign language, or prototyping a web game, and the like. But ultimately its nothing that is worth trillions of dollars.
But if you have any ambition at all---if you want to map the local school board, or get a quick understanding of your finances, or set up a robot in your backyard---then, quickly proves useful.
My long-term hope (and call me another Zitron if you wish) is that the labs' hype dissipates if there's no serious improvements beyond stringing together agents to ram through brick wall Millennium Prize style problems and we all just use on-device AI for 99% of cases where it's useful, researchers, governments, militaries, and universities can pay for the more complex models, and image/video gen dies a slow death (if Congress will actually legislate and/or SCOTUS decides that training those specific models does not qualify as fair use unlike training LLMs) and cost for compute rises over time as public interest in the tech sours.
LLMs are such marvelous and incredible technology squandered by genuinely deranged Silicon Valley cultists who are trying to use them as a Trojan horse to force their antisocial visions of the future upon an unsuspecting populace. We could all have just invested in on-device compute and nobody would have lost their jobs in pointless layoffs, productivity would have increased, and maybe we would have forced a conversation about when and when not to use AI and it wouldn't be so ever-present in use cases where it actually does harm to the consumer and society. But sama, PT, and dario just wouldn't have it that way, would they? Because if that were the case, there's no prospective hope where they can assuage their deep-seated insecurities over being antisocial and off-putting by reassuring themselves that there's an imminent realignment of society where they will hold all the cards when the dust settles.
Gettin closer to fully dynamic interfaces for a lot of software. Hell, give me a mode in Google Docs that takes every pixel of chrome away then vibe the rest as I need it. Persist across new documents going forward.
And now we are asking LLMs to solve it.
seems a bit like a snake eating its own tail
Obviously if your model is stuck inside a CLI terminal, then not so much. But in a GUI harness (shameless plug for my own one: https://juggler.studio, but I assume others can do this too), you just ask them to answer in HTML and they'll happily draw pretty pictures inline in the conversation. I've been doing this for ages with claude, GPT, Deepseek and others.
Unsure if this has been done already but the best thing I did was get it to create a list of next steps as quick buttons that it keeps updated in a docked card. It works well but occasionally gets stuck on some un related rabbit hole.
Supposedly, people were struggling to follow written manuals and they needed an interactive explanations.
I'm not a mathematician and I would certainly love having a tool that would do ELI5 on some complex stuff, but I'm really worrying about using this too often and outsourcing my ability to do stuff to some mega corp.
why not just stream html?
For elements that manage layout and drawing things like these explainers, though, it's hard for me to imagine how that would work. My immediate thought would be to an abstraction over it, which is what it sounds like they did.
This is now trying to steal YouTube repair and cooking videos. Here is news for you: People prefer YouTube repair and cooking videos.
Not sure about the cooking one but repair videos are horrible. People with thick accent, the worst camera, shittiest lightning and bad angles where you can't see what you have to do.
But getting actual service manuals cheap/free these days can be tricky, and their quality can leave a good bit to be desired.
"Here is a library of [svelte/react/whatever] components, use them to construct a helpful visual to demonstrate your point."
The deconstructed bike at the beginning was in a class of its own, however.
What is it supposed to demonstrate? That the model knows some kind of folk mereology?
I suspect it will struggle with anything that isn't simple enough for demo-mode or lifestyle fluff.
I guess the above is mostly mobile focused.
> Also pick up garlic, rosemary, thyme, lemons, honey, almonds, olive oil, gravy ingredients, mint sauce, crumble topping and vanilla ice cream.
what??? how the hell are you supposed to remember all that. Even the before example tells you what kind of potatoes to get. tbh it would be cool if you could just click a button and get an order pre-filled out on a grocery delivery/pickup service. I really wonder who reviewed this post and if they cook, because imagining yourself in that scenario and reading those instructions falls apart very fast
This is false.
Edit: be sure to check Claude settings -> Capabilities -> Visuals.
Ok so this is how you build a moat. Models are not a commodity and visualization isnt a purely harness problem.
> We expanded our training methods to help the model make thoughtful decisions about content, layout, visuals, and interaction. This included evaluating the interfaces it creates for clarity, usefulness, and completeness. GPT‑6 learned to use the component library and make good design decisions, including how to organize information clearly, when to use interactivity, and when a simple text response is enough.
Curious to know how they trained it produce appropriate visuals. And why that cant be done with propmt engineering.
Or, more probably IMHO, most people will keep using the standard UIs because they are ready and they need no work to build.
Now they extracted the value from interoperable open systems, they would love to replace it with closed proprietary systems.
How do sites like Wikipedia get updated? What if I need to upload important documents to different portals? It all has to go through the AI companies? They have access to medical records too? My taxes, social security, etc?
Is this how Microsoft imagines Office 365 and Sharepoint will be merged into? Disney, NY Times, Youtube, Netflix will all be fine with chatbots handling their content?
Given that OpenAI is making noises about merging work with chat (a horrible idea imo), and Work is very similar to Codex... I dearly hope things like these won't have any meaningful cross-polination into the actual work tools.
Seeing that the chat is based on 6.0 and not 6.1 is disappointing. The "Visual and interactive explanations" seems genuinely useful, but 6.1 is just so much better. I wouldn't truly trust the 6.1 with the explanations, but I'd trust them a fair bit more than 6.0. I understand that compute isn't infinite, but tons of people only interact with the chat and having your "things-explainer" be as good as it can be is important when people increasingly treat AI models as the source of truth, or even use them for academic learning and whatnot.
Still, the models will improve, so the visual explainer seems pretty good as an idea / mvp.
My most used prompt in the last week is probably "Explain this concisely and simply, like I am a child".
I spent years dumbing things down and creating visuals to support it for decision makers. I am frequently asking ChatGPT to do the same for me.
And that is a problem. I am not guiltless ( I am working one such abomination now! ). The dumbing down of everything has to stop somewhere. Just because my boss thinks hiss bosses are retards does not mean I have to endure simplified muse where I can't change much.. I get that normal people like it. Fuck em. They are making their choice.
For me, I try to spend as little time in QuickBooks as possible.
mine is “explain this 2 me in simple terms”
I'm more worried about picture accuracy: usually the benefit of pictures in recipes is to see what you're aiming at (eg, how finely chopped something is), but I don't know if the image model is up to that level of detail.
As a highly literate person, it is easy to overestimate the share of the population that is highly literate.
Kinda just feels like google search results in AI, which imo is a step down from distilled information. Chatgpt is already able to generate charts and visuals upon request.
Curious why that feels condescending? Like, the average person who is seeking a recipe needs a photo to know what to shoot for
The menu: Rosemary and garlic roast lamb, Extra-crispy roast potatoes, Honey-roasted carrots and parsnips, broccoli.
The photo: [1] Roast turkey, mashed potatoes, baby carrots, broccoli, brussels sprouts. No lamb, no parsnips.
If you shoot for what's in the photo, you're going to have a bad time.
You're also going to have a bad time when you try to make an apple crumble with no flour, no sugar, and no butter, because they're not on the shopping list.
[1] https://images.openai.com/static-rsc-4/gyzrX8zp3O2KLEPm0FAqh...
I feel like it can only be successful by luck. Either it's reproducing a recipe verbatim that was tried and validated and tasted by a human, in which case, we didn't need AI for that, just a searchable cookbook. Or, it's making one up. I understand that using RLHF has helped improve the quality of questions about history, programming, or TV show recommendations, but I do not believe that there has been some kind of training regime where people prompt the models for "a recipe that uses X, Y, Z random ingredients," follow the recipe, and then score it. And even if they do, I don't see how a model can learn enough from that besides "this exact recipe is good/bad." '1/2 tsp cumin' may be a great addition to one recipe and not enough for another, so improving the output based on a bunch of scored recipes... I just don't believe cooking is an LLM job.
Maybe some other kind of model that I don't know about.
The user is probably in a grocery store. They need to buy the stuff first. Showing them a picture of a finished product is an irrelevant distraction.
Then, if there is some arguably relevant content you can tack it on afterwards.
Prepare to lose essentially unlimited chat mode.
I imagine many will move to claude, as I will (return), unless anthropic makes more blunders.
Random link I found looking for the twitter post
https://pasqualepillitteri.it/en/news/21024/openai-merge-cha...
The only things that OAI still have over A/ are better coding agent GUI, no 5hr limit on >$100, much more reasonable cybersec guardrails (that allow most RE work) and... that's it.