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AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

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Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#101

Post by TeMPOraL »

jart wrote: post #86
Animats wrote: post #63

This article isn't too helpful. There have been many "UI Paradigms", but the fancier ones tended to be special purpose. The first one worthy of the name was for train dispatching. That was General Railway Signal's NX (eNtry-Exit) system.[1] Introduced in 1936, still in use in the New York subways. With NX, the dispatcher routing an approaching train selected the "entry" track on which the train was approaching. The s…

When you say train dispatching and control panels, I think you've illustrated how confused this whole discussion is. There should be a separate term called "operator interface" that is separate from "user interface" because UIs have never had any locus of control, because they're for users, and operators are the ones in control. Requesting that an LLM do something is like pressing the button to close the doors of an…

Oh my. This is the first time I've seen this kind of distinction between "users" and "operators" in context of a single system. I kind of always assumed that "operator" is just a synonym for "user" in industries/contexts that are dealing with tools instead of toys.

But this absolutely makes sense, and it is a succinct description for the complaints some of us frequently make about modern UI trends: bad interfaces are the ones that make us feel like "users", where we expect to be "operators".

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#102

Post by karaterobot »

golemotron wrote: post #28
karaterobot wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your view, then, is AI best described as an incremental improvement over (say) SQL in terms of the tasks it enables users to complete?

Incremental improvement over Google search. And, it's not about the tasks that it enables users to complete, it is about the UI paradigm as per the article.

Sorry for the confusion, I just view UI as being basically synonymous with task completion: in the end, the user interface is the set of tools the system gives users to complete tasks.

Since the Google search interface is meant to look like you're talking to an AI, and probably has a lot of what we'd call AI under the hood, to turn natural language prompts into a query, I'm not surprised you view it as an incremental improvement at best.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#103

Post by ra »

Animats wrote: post #82
ignoramous wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations will be tamed, I think. Only a matter of time (~3 to 5 years [0]) given the amount of research going into it? With that in mind, ambient computing has always threatened to be the next frontier in Human-Computer Interaction. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and G Home predate today's LLM hype. Dare I say, the hype is real. As a consumer, GPT4 has shown capabilities far beyond whatever preceded it (with th…

> Hallucinations will be tamed. I hope so. But so far, most of the proposals seem to involve bolting something on the outside of the black box of the LLM itself. If medium-sized language models can be made hallucination-free, we'll see more applications. A base language model that has most of the language but doesn't try to contain all human knowledge, plus a special purpose model for the task at hand, would be very…

Kaparthy explained how LLMs can retrospectively assess their own output and judge if they were wrong.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZQun8Y4L2A&t=1607s

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#104

Post by TeMPOraL »

Animats wrote: post #82
ignoramous wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations will be tamed, I think. Only a matter of time (~3 to 5 years [0]) given the amount of research going into it? With that in mind, ambient computing has always threatened to be the next frontier in Human-Computer Interaction. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and G Home predate today's LLM hype. Dare I say, the hype is real. As a consumer, GPT4 has shown capabilities far beyond whatever preceded it (with th…

> Hallucinations will be tamed. I hope so. But so far, most of the proposals seem to involve bolting something on the outside of the black box of the LLM itself. If medium-sized language models can be made hallucination-free, we'll see more applications. A base language model that has most of the language but doesn't try to contain all human knowledge, plus a special purpose model for the task at hand, would be very…

> But so far, most of the proposals seem to involve bolting something on the outside of the black box of the LLM itself.

This might be the only way. I maintain that, if we're making analogies to humans, then LLMs best fit as equivalent of one's inner voice - the thing sitting at the border between the conscious and the (un/sub)conscious, which surfaces thoughts in form of language - the "stream of consciousness". The instinctive, gut-feel responses which... you typically don't voice, because they tend to sound right but usually aren't. Much like we do extra processing, conscious or otherwise, to turn that stream of consciousness into something reasonably correct, I feel the future of LLMs is to be a component of a system, surrounded by additional layers that process the LLM's output, or do a back-and-forth with it, until something reasonably certain and free of hallucinations is reached.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#105

Post by zgluck »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #92
zgluck wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is not the point here. Did you any point believe that you were experiencing a mass market user experience at those times?

I was experiencing something declarative at that point. What's your actual position? Is "declarative" the relevant piece, or is it "mass market user experience"?

My point here is that what Norman Nielsen deals with is "mass market user experience". This has been very clear for a very long time.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#106

Post by Animats »

PheonixPharts wrote: post #84
ignoramous wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hallucinations will be tamed, I think. Only a matter of time (~3 to 5 years [0]) given the amount of research going into it? With that in mind, ambient computing has always threatened to be the next frontier in Human-Computer Interaction. Siri, Google Assistant, Alexa, and G Home predate today's LLM hype. Dare I say, the hype is real. As a consumer, GPT4 has shown capabilities far beyond whatever preceded it (with th…

> Hallucinations will be tamed, I think. I don't think that's likely unless there was a latent space of "Truth" which could be discovered through the right model. That would be a far more revolutionary discovery than anyone can possibly imagine. For starters the last 300+ years of Western Philosophy would be essentially proven unequivocally wrong. edit: If you're going to downvote this please elaborate. LLMs currentl…

> I don't think that's likely unless there was a latent space of "Truth" which could be discovered through the right model.

For many medium-sized problems, there is. "Operate car accessories" is a good example. So is "book travel".

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#107

Post by jart »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #101
jart wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say train dispatching and control panels, I think you've illustrated how confused this whole discussion is. There should be a separate term called "operator interface" that is separate from "user interface" because UIs have never had any locus of control, because they're for users, and operators are the ones in control. Requesting that an LLM do something is like pressing the button to close the doors of an…

Oh my. This is the first time I've seen this kind of distinction between "users" and "operators" in context of a single system. I kind of always assumed that "operator" is just a synonym for "user" in industries/contexts that are dealing with tools instead of toys. But this absolutely makes sense, and it is a succinct description for the complaints some of us frequently make about modern UI trends: bad interfaces are…

Oh snap, did I just pull back the curtain?

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#108

Post by dlivingston »

EGreg wrote: post #52
dlivingston wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who just spent 2 hours in my company's Confluence site, trying to track down the answer to a single question that could have been resolved in seconds by an LLM trained on an internal corporate corpus -- LLMs are very much not a fad.

How do you know the answer is right? Because it linked you to the source? Like a vector database would? Google offered to index sites since 1996.

We have internal search. Finding things isn't the problem. It's contextualizing massive amounts of text and making it queryable with natural language.

The question I was trying to solve was -- "what is feature XYZ? How does it work in hardware & software? How is it exposed in our ABC software, and where do the hooks exist to interface with XYZ?"

The answers exist across maybe 30 different Confluence pages, plus source code, plus source code documentation, plus some PDFs. If all of that was indexed by an LLM, it would have been trivial to get the answer I spent hours manually assembling.

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#109

Post by layoric »

I built a proof of concept recently that tries to show a generic hybrid of command and intent[0]. The UI generates form representations of API calls the AI agent has decided on making to complete the task (in this case booking a meeting). Some API calls are restricted so only a human can make them, which they do by being presented with a form waiting for them to submit to continue.

If the user is vague, the bot will ask questions and try to discover the information it needs. It’s only a proof of concept but I think it’s a pattern I will try to build on , as it can provide a very flexible interface.

[0] https://gptmeetings.netcore.io/

Re: AI: First New UI Paradigm in 60 Years?

#110

Post by rzzzt »

Bjorkbat wrote: post #88

I really wouldn’t call GUIs a “command-based paradigm”. Feels much more like they’re digital analogues of tools and objects. Your mouse is a tool, and you use it to interface with objects and things, and through special software it can become a more specialized tool (word processors, spreadsheets, graphic design software, etc). You aren’t issuing commands, you’re manipulating a digital environment with tools. Which i…

AutoCAD and Rhino 3D are two examples that I remember having a command prompt sitting proudly somewhere at the bottom of the UI. Your mouse clicks and keyboard shortcuts were all converted into commands in text form. If you look at your command history, it's a script - a bit boring since it is completely linear, but add loops, conditionals and function/macro support and you get a very capable scripting environment.
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