> we optimise for how fast we can implement marketable (and often hostile) features.
I actually think local LMs are the antidote for this. Every UI I use these days is optimized by designers for attractiveness and hordes of PMs for business KPIs, not engineers for useful functionality. With local LMs I can take back control over the UI I actually use. The LM can deal with whatever trash UI redesign is being forced on me, and present a much simpler UI that matches my specific needs.
For example, it can summarize the news and I never have to visit a news site and be assaulted by dark patterns. It can collect family photos from Facebook and show me a few without random TikTok videos inserted between them. It can trawl Amazon and Target and Walmart to find a shortlist of products for me to pick from, filtering the trash. It can watch that 10 minute long YouTube video past the sponsored segment to find the nugget of information I need to fix my dishwasher or whatever.
We're a long way from this now. But I see a path there, and a world where users have control over the UIs they use is a better world.
We very much differ in optimism I think. I expect model-driven UIs to end up the same as software and services today: you can use open, non-hostile options if you go out of your way, but most people use the offerings from the big corporations and if you want a friction-free experience you have to as well.
I would love to use a third-party Instagram app that only shows posts from accounts I follow, but I can’t because Facebook has locked that down. I can just as easily see a future where I can summarise my feed, but only if I use the Metabot or whatever which is just implementing some different dark pattern.
Although that does bring me back somewhat to my initial point in that it all feels like brute forcing our way out of problems instead of solving them. We could have a Facebook that shows a nice summary of your family photos, we could have a shopping search engine that doesn’t include the trash, we could have short and to the point videos that aren’t optimising for the engagement flavour of the month.
We don’t because there are too many financial incentives pushing back and too many established players that can burn piles of money for much longer than you, and I just do not see how those same facets won’t just be translated for models.
> I would love to use a third-party Instagram app that only shows posts from accounts I follow, but I can’t because Facebook has locked that down
The point is that this is a local model. You don't have to use Meta's AI because Meta can't stop you from running a model on your own computer to browse Instagram for you and filter it however you like.
Personally I think that, if "model-driven browsing" (for lack of a better term) does take off, we'll see mitigations against it. Not unlike how we currently see mitigations (of mixed effectiveness) against ad-blockers and using things like Puppeteer as scraping tools.
I'm sorry to be so pessimistic about it, and I genuinely do hope we see some positives out of this stuff. But I'm becoming increasingly disillusioned with what so much of the software industry has become, and seeing how much of the AI space is led or backed by the tech giants, I can't help but assume the worst.
I would like something like Perplexity Pro that I could run locally. I have little pieces in the LangChain/LlamaIndex book I wrote and more little pieces in my new open source project [1]. I have become addicted to Perplexity Pro, it makes the web fun again for me, but I would like to have open source code I could run locally with similar functionality (that would be difficult because Perplexity Pro is a brilliant product).
I actually think local LMs are the antidote for this. Every UI I use these days is optimized by designers for attractiveness and hordes of PMs for business KPIs, not engineers for useful functionality. With local LMs I can take back control over the UI I actually use. The LM can deal with whatever trash UI redesign is being forced on me, and present a much simpler UI that matches my specific needs.
For example, it can summarize the news and I never have to visit a news site and be assaulted by dark patterns. It can collect family photos from Facebook and show me a few without random TikTok videos inserted between them. It can trawl Amazon and Target and Walmart to find a shortlist of products for me to pick from, filtering the trash. It can watch that 10 minute long YouTube video past the sponsored segment to find the nugget of information I need to fix my dishwasher or whatever.
We're a long way from this now. But I see a path there, and a world where users have control over the UIs they use is a better world.