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Everyone's been talking about how ChatGPT will disrupt search, but looking at the launch partners, I think this has the potential to completely subvert the OS /

Everyone's been talking about how ChatGPT will disrupt search, but looking at the launch partners, I think this has the potential to completely subvert the OS / App Store layer. On some level, how much do I need an OpenTable app if I can use voice/text input and a multi-modal response that will ultimately book my reservation? Not saying mobile's going away, but this could be the thing that does to mobile what mobile did to desktop.

tough 4y ago
I agree, it's a revolutionary new better UX paradigm.
lalos 4y ago
Most (if not all) of those apps are free though, you supply them as a convenience because you know that smartphone owners spend money. The host OS loses access to that info, and that is used to target better ads in certain phone platforms.
modeless 4y ago
We have reached "peak UI". In the future we're not going to need every service to build four different versions of their app for every major platform. They can just build a barebones web app and the AI will use it for you, you'll never have to even see it.
- killthebuddha 4y ago
  IMO you won't even need to build the app, you'll just provide a data model and some natural language descriptions of what you want your product to do.
  - nprateem 4y ago
    Except you won't if you want to make money because then you don't have a business
    - Aeolos 4y ago
      And that is why some people think this AI leap could be as big as the internet.
    - IanCal 4y ago
      Unless you charge for providing services of value to people.
    - revelio 4y ago
      Charge people for installing your plugin into ChatGPT.
    - killthebuddha 4y ago
      I mean yeah, you'll have to provide a data model (and data) that other people don't have.
  - twobitshifter 4y ago
    That’s how this plugin system works already.
    - killthebuddha 4y ago
      I don't think this is the case. You provide an API spec but you also have to provide the implementation of that API. ChatGPT is basically a concierge between your API and the user.
      - int_19h 4y ago
        I think the API is meant to be the data model in this scenario. The point is that you design the API around the task that it solves, rather than against whatever fixed spec OpenAI publishes. And then you tell ChatGPT, "here's an AI, make use of it for ..." - and it magically does, without you having to write any plumbing.
        killthebuddha 4y ago
        It sounds like you might have it backwards. The API spec is published by you and the AI consumes it.
        int_19h 4y ago
        It should read "here's an API", of course.
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      It isn't yet. For example, Wolfram Alpha is an app that GPT is communicating to, and it actually exists.
- nonethewiser 4y ago
  I mean, if you consider mobile we might already be down from the peak. In the sense that the interface bandwidth has shrunk to whatever 2 fingers can handle.
- huskyZ 4y ago
  Headless app is the way to go.
sharemywin 4y ago
So, what's your prediction? Windows Phone has ChatGPT or the other phone os makers add Microsoft Chat App.
vineyardmike 4y ago
People said this about Alexa/Siri et al and it didn’t happen. ChatGPT is way better at understanding you, so that’s a big boost. It could be a great tool/assistant but it probably won’t replace apps. The problem with those other platforms that this doesn’t address include: - discoverability. How do you learn what features a service supports. On a GUI you can just see the buttons, but on a chat interface you have to ask and poke around conversationally. - Cost/availability. While a service is server bound, it can go down and specifically for LLMs, the cost is high per request. Can you imagine it costing $0.1 a day per user to use an app? LLMs can’t run locally yet. - Branding. Open table might want to protect their brand and wouldn’t want to be reduced to an API. It goes both ways - Alexa struggled with differentiating skills and user data from Amazon experiences. - monetization. The conversational UI is a lot less convenient to include advertisements, so it’s a lot harder for traditionally free services to monetize. Edit: plugins are still really cool! But probably won’t replace the OSes we know.
- LouisSayers 4y ago
  Who's to say though that it'll always stay a text format. They could bring in calendar, payment, other UI functionality... Basically they could rethink how everything is done on the Web today.
  - billiam 4y ago
    It almost certainly won't take the form of a text format. Impersonating a chatbot or a search engine GUI is just the fastest way for OpenAI to accumulate a few hundred million users, to leave the competition for user data and metadata behind.
  - aryamaan 4y ago
    it would likely take the form of just in time software.
- sho_hn 4y ago
  I think you're missing the fact that the LLM could also generate the frontend on the fly by e.g. spitting out frontend code in a markup language like QML. What's a multi-activity Android app if not an elaborate notebook? Branding can just be a parameter. Sure, maybe OpenTable would like to retain control. But they'll probably just use the AI API to implement that control and run the app.
HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
This is what Apple's Siri was meant to be. Apple bought Siri from SRI international (Siri = SRI), and when it was launched was meant to include ability to book restaurants etc (thereby bypassing search), but somehow those capabilities were never released and today Siri still can't even control the iPhone! My hot take on ChatGPT plugins is a bit mixed - should be very powerful, and maybe significant revenue generator, but at same time doesn't seem in the least bit responsible. We barely understand ChatGPT itself, and now it's suddenly being given ability to perform arbitrary actions!
- rvnx 4y ago
  Siri's capabilities are somehow much closer to Google Bard than ChatGPT (have tried all of them).
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
    That's a bit harsh on Bard, but yes - just got access today and it's surprisingly weak.
    - mlboss 4y ago
      BARD just gives up on coding questions.
- CobrastanJorji 4y ago
  Google's assistant, on the other hand, did figure out the reservation trick. Reportedly "book a table for four people at [restaurant name] tomorrow night" actually works, though I've never tried it.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
    Interesting - I wasn't aware of that. Will have to Google to see what else it may be capable of. Google really needs to update assistant with something LLM based though, and it seems Bard really isn't up to the job.
Bjorkbat 4y ago
I'm kind of skeptical of this simply because people were saying the same thing about chatbots back when there was a lot of hype around Messenger. Sure, they weren't as advanced as what we have now, but they were fundamentally capable of the same things. Not only did the hype not pan out, but it feels as if they were completely forgotten. In a nutshell that's why I'm still largely dismissive of anything related to GPT. It's 2016-2018 all over again. Same tech demos. Same promises. Same hype. I honestly can't see the big fundamental breakthroughs or major shifts. I just see improvements, but not game-changing ones.
- fullshark 4y ago
  Yeah being able to generate media/text is what excites me about these models, more than using my voice or a text input to do X instead of a webpage which has a GUI and buttons and text boxes.
- swalling 4y ago
  This is a healthy skepticism but the difference was that using Messenger chatbots was a disjointed, clunky experience that felt slower than just a few taps in the OpenTable app. Not to mention that their natural language understanding was only marginally better than Siri at best. In this scenario, it seems dramatically faster to type or speak "Find me a dinner reservation for 4 tomorrow at a Thai or Vietnamese restaurant near me." than to browse Google Maps or OpenTable. It then comes down to the quality and personalization of the results, and ChatGPT has a leg up on Google here just due to the fact that their results are not filled with ads and garbage SEO bait.
- nmca 4y ago
  This time it works.
- golol 4y ago
  >but they were fundamentally capable of the same things. This is not the case. The difference between current state of the art NLP and chatbots 3 years ago is so massive, it has to be seen as qualitative. Pre GPT-3 computers did not understand language and no commerical chatbot had any AI. Now computers can understand language.
huskyZ 4y ago
Yes it will change the application layer. LLM allows using NUI as the universal interface to invoke under-utilized data & apis. We can now develop super-app rather than many one-off apps. I have been exploring this idea since 2021, love to connect with anyone who wants to work in this space.
MagicMoonlight 4y ago
I’m surprised Apple hasn’t improved siri with a model like this. Currently it’s just trash but with a GPT style model behind it you could actually get it to do things.
- scarface74 4y ago
  Why is it surprising? The amount of CPU resources server side to work on a billion iOS devices at any sort of performance level is extreme. The limitations on making Siri more useful is just adding and refining its intent system. It already integrates with Wolfram Alpha for instance.
pxtail 4y ago
I'm afraid that it has potential to subvert everything, looking at the plugins initiative is not hard to think like this: imagine the world where separate websites and just browsing websites as we know it doesn't exist, instead one is interacting with the model(s) directly to do what needs to be done - asking for news, buying new present for kids, discussing car models with selected price range etc.
- seydor 4y ago
  As long as the services do get paid, this is not much different than what we have now Google gatekeeps everything currently, it s in the browser, the search button, the phone etc. Having chatbots instead of google is better
- s__s 4y ago
  It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced the average person has any interest in texting or talking out loud to their device to complete all their computing tasks. It’s slower for most things. Also I think there will be little interest in delegating that level of control to a single source for anything that’s important. For example, say I’ve got 5k to spend on home theatre gear, why on earth should I trust Shopify’s AI to suggest what I need and find the best price? The incentives aren’t in alignment.
  - pbronez 4y ago
    That’s what went wrong with Alexa. They figured people would buy stuff via voice, but nobody trusted it for that.
ridewinter 4y ago
Anything preventing Bard/etc from using these plugins as well? Would be nice to keep the ecosystem open.
- dragonwriter 4y ago
  There’s nothing stopping any LLM-backed chatbot from using plugins; the ReAct pattern discussed recently on HN is a general pattern for incorporating them. The main limits are that unless they are integral and trained-in (which is less flexible), each takes space in the prompt, and in any case the interaction also takes token space, all of which reduces the token space available to the main conversation.
- sebzim4500 4y ago
  My experience with Bard is it probably isn't smart enough to figure out on its own how to use these. Google would probably have to do special finetuning/hardcoding for the plugins that they want to work.
- nemo44x 4y ago
  Bard is a tard so I doubt it. Google is done.
scarface74 4y ago
Why do you think Apple would care? It came out in the Epic trial that 80%+ of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases in play to win games and buying loot boxes. Apple doesn’t make any money from OpenTable.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
015a 4y ago
I'm not sure if the word "subvert" is right; the OS is still there, the App Store is still there, and nothing they've demonstrated will measurably impact revenue from these sources (the iOS App Store's largest source of revenue, by far, is games. Some estimates put Games as like 25% of all of Apple's revenue). I think there's also a global challenge (actually, opportunity IS the right word here) that by-and-large the makers of operating systems aren't the ones ahead in the language AI game right now. Bard/Google may have been close six months ago, but six months is an eternity in this space. Siri/Apple is so far behind that its not looking likely they can catch up. About a week ago a Windows 11 update was shipped which added a Bing AI button to the Windows 11 search bar; but Windows doesn't really drive the zeitgeist. I wonder if 2023/4 is the year for Microsoft to jump back into the smartphone OS game. There may finally be something to the idea of a more minimalist, smaller voice-first smartphone that falls back on the web for application experiences, versus app-first.
s1k3s 4y ago
> and a multi-modal response that will ultimately book my reservation? How is it going to do that? OpenTable's value isn't in the tech, a 15 yo could implement that over the weekend. Or maybe chatGPT can be put in the restaurant, and somehow figure out how to seat you. And then you'd have a human talking to chatGPT and chatGPT talking to another chatGPT to complete the task. That'll be interesting, but otherwise this is overly complicated for all parties involved.

tough 4y ago

I agree, it's a revolutionary new better UX paradigm.

lalos 4y ago

Most (if not all) of those apps are free though, you supply them as a convenience because you know that smartphone owners spend money. The host OS loses access to that info, and that is used to target better ads in certain phone platforms.

modeless 4y ago

We have reached "peak UI". In the future we're not going to need every service to build four different versions of their app for every major platform. They can just build a barebones web app and the AI will use it for you, you'll never have to even see it.

killthebuddha 4y ago
IMO you won't even need to build the app, you'll just provide a data model and some natural language descriptions of what you want your product to do.
- nprateem 4y ago
  Except you won't if you want to make money because then you don't have a business
  - Aeolos 4y ago
    And that is why some people think this AI leap could be as big as the internet.
  - IanCal 4y ago
    Unless you charge for providing services of value to people.
  - revelio 4y ago
    Charge people for installing your plugin into ChatGPT.
  - killthebuddha 4y ago
    I mean yeah, you'll have to provide a data model (and data) that other people don't have.
- twobitshifter 4y ago
  That’s how this plugin system works already.
  - killthebuddha 4y ago
    I don't think this is the case. You provide an API spec but you also have to provide the implementation of that API. ChatGPT is basically a concierge between your API and the user.
    - int_19h 4y ago
      I think the API is meant to be the data model in this scenario. The point is that you design the API around the task that it solves, rather than against whatever fixed spec OpenAI publishes. And then you tell ChatGPT, "here's an AI, make use of it for ..." - and it magically does, without you having to write any plumbing.
      - killthebuddha 4y ago
        It sounds like you might have it backwards. The API spec is published by you and the AI consumes it.
        int_19h 4y ago
        It should read "here's an API", of course.
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    It isn't yet. For example, Wolfram Alpha is an app that GPT is communicating to, and it actually exists.
nonethewiser 4y ago
I mean, if you consider mobile we might already be down from the peak. In the sense that the interface bandwidth has shrunk to whatever 2 fingers can handle.
huskyZ 4y ago
Headless app is the way to go.

sharemywin 4y ago

So, what's your prediction? Windows Phone has ChatGPT or the other phone os makers add Microsoft Chat App.

vineyardmike 4y ago

People said this about Alexa/Siri et al and it didn’t happen. ChatGPT is way better at understanding you, so that’s a big boost. It could be a great tool/assistant but it probably won’t replace apps. The problem with those other platforms that this doesn’t address include: - discoverability. How do you learn what features a service supports. On a GUI you can just see the buttons, but on a chat interface you have to ask and poke around conversationally. - Cost/availability. While a service is server bound, it can go down and specifically for LLMs, the cost is high per request. Can you imagine it costing $0.1 a day per user to use an app? LLMs can’t run locally yet. - Branding. Open table might want to protect their brand and wouldn’t want to be reduced to an API. It goes both ways - Alexa struggled with differentiating skills and user data from Amazon experiences. - monetization. The conversational UI is a lot less convenient to include advertisements, so it’s a lot harder for traditionally free services to monetize. Edit: plugins are still really cool! But probably won’t replace the OSes we know.

LouisSayers 4y ago
Who's to say though that it'll always stay a text format. They could bring in calendar, payment, other UI functionality... Basically they could rethink how everything is done on the Web today.
- billiam 4y ago
  It almost certainly won't take the form of a text format. Impersonating a chatbot or a search engine GUI is just the fastest way for OpenAI to accumulate a few hundred million users, to leave the competition for user data and metadata behind.
- aryamaan 4y ago
  it would likely take the form of just in time software.
sho_hn 4y ago
I think you're missing the fact that the LLM could also generate the frontend on the fly by e.g. spitting out frontend code in a markup language like QML. What's a multi-activity Android app if not an elaborate notebook? Branding can just be a parameter. Sure, maybe OpenTable would like to retain control. But they'll probably just use the AI API to implement that control and run the app.

HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago

This is what Apple's Siri was meant to be. Apple bought Siri from SRI international (Siri = SRI), and when it was launched was meant to include ability to book restaurants etc (thereby bypassing search), but somehow those capabilities were never released and today Siri still can't even control the iPhone! My hot take on ChatGPT plugins is a bit mixed - should be very powerful, and maybe significant revenue generator, but at same time doesn't seem in the least bit responsible. We barely understand ChatGPT itself, and now it's suddenly being given ability to perform arbitrary actions!

rvnx 4y ago
Siri's capabilities are somehow much closer to Google Bard than ChatGPT (have tried all of them).
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  That's a bit harsh on Bard, but yes - just got access today and it's surprisingly weak.
  - mlboss 4y ago
    BARD just gives up on coding questions.
CobrastanJorji 4y ago
Google's assistant, on the other hand, did figure out the reservation trick. Reportedly "book a table for four people at [restaurant name] tomorrow night" actually works, though I've never tried it.
- HarHarVeryFunny 4y ago
  Interesting - I wasn't aware of that. Will have to Google to see what else it may be capable of. Google really needs to update assistant with something LLM based though, and it seems Bard really isn't up to the job.

Bjorkbat 4y ago

I'm kind of skeptical of this simply because people were saying the same thing about chatbots back when there was a lot of hype around Messenger. Sure, they weren't as advanced as what we have now, but they were fundamentally capable of the same things. Not only did the hype not pan out, but it feels as if they were completely forgotten. In a nutshell that's why I'm still largely dismissive of anything related to GPT. It's 2016-2018 all over again. Same tech demos. Same promises. Same hype. I honestly can't see the big fundamental breakthroughs or major shifts. I just see improvements, but not game-changing ones.

fullshark 4y ago
Yeah being able to generate media/text is what excites me about these models, more than using my voice or a text input to do X instead of a webpage which has a GUI and buttons and text boxes.
swalling 4y ago
This is a healthy skepticism but the difference was that using Messenger chatbots was a disjointed, clunky experience that felt slower than just a few taps in the OpenTable app. Not to mention that their natural language understanding was only marginally better than Siri at best. In this scenario, it seems dramatically faster to type or speak "Find me a dinner reservation for 4 tomorrow at a Thai or Vietnamese restaurant near me." than to browse Google Maps or OpenTable. It then comes down to the quality and personalization of the results, and ChatGPT has a leg up on Google here just due to the fact that their results are not filled with ads and garbage SEO bait.
nmca 4y ago
This time it works.
golol 4y ago
>but they were fundamentally capable of the same things. This is not the case. The difference between current state of the art NLP and chatbots 3 years ago is so massive, it has to be seen as qualitative. Pre GPT-3 computers did not understand language and no commerical chatbot had any AI. Now computers can understand language.

huskyZ 4y ago

Yes it will change the application layer. LLM allows using NUI as the universal interface to invoke under-utilized data & apis. We can now develop super-app rather than many one-off apps. I have been exploring this idea since 2021, love to connect with anyone who wants to work in this space.

MagicMoonlight 4y ago

I’m surprised Apple hasn’t improved siri with a model like this. Currently it’s just trash but with a GPT style model behind it you could actually get it to do things.

scarface74 4y ago
Why is it surprising? The amount of CPU resources server side to work on a billion iOS devices at any sort of performance level is extreme. The limitations on making Siri more useful is just adding and refining its intent system. It already integrates with Wolfram Alpha for instance.

pxtail 4y ago

I'm afraid that it has potential to subvert everything, looking at the plugins initiative is not hard to think like this: imagine the world where separate websites and just browsing websites as we know it doesn't exist, instead one is interacting with the model(s) directly to do what needs to be done - asking for news, buying new present for kids, discussing car models with selected price range etc.

seydor 4y ago
As long as the services do get paid, this is not much different than what we have now Google gatekeeps everything currently, it s in the browser, the search button, the phone etc. Having chatbots instead of google is better
s__s 4y ago
It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not convinced the average person has any interest in texting or talking out loud to their device to complete all their computing tasks. It’s slower for most things. Also I think there will be little interest in delegating that level of control to a single source for anything that’s important. For example, say I’ve got 5k to spend on home theatre gear, why on earth should I trust Shopify’s AI to suggest what I need and find the best price? The incentives aren’t in alignment.
- pbronez 4y ago
  That’s what went wrong with Alexa. They figured people would buy stuff via voice, but nobody trusted it for that.

ridewinter 4y ago

Anything preventing Bard/etc from using these plugins as well? Would be nice to keep the ecosystem open.

dragonwriter 4y ago
There’s nothing stopping any LLM-backed chatbot from using plugins; the ReAct pattern discussed recently on HN is a general pattern for incorporating them. The main limits are that unless they are integral and trained-in (which is less flexible), each takes space in the prompt, and in any case the interaction also takes token space, all of which reduces the token space available to the main conversation.
sebzim4500 4y ago
My experience with Bard is it probably isn't smart enough to figure out on its own how to use these. Google would probably have to do special finetuning/hardcoding for the plugins that they want to work.
nemo44x 4y ago
Bard is a tard so I doubt it. Google is done.

scarface74 4y ago

Why do you think Apple would care? It came out in the Epic trial that 80%+ of App Store revenue comes from in app purchases in play to win games and buying loot boxes. Apple doesn’t make any money from OpenTable.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

015a 4y ago

I'm not sure if the word "subvert" is right; the OS is still there, the App Store is still there, and nothing they've demonstrated will measurably impact revenue from these sources (the iOS App Store's largest source of revenue, by far, is games. Some estimates put Games as like 25% of all of Apple's revenue). I think there's also a global challenge (actually, opportunity IS the right word here) that by-and-large the makers of operating systems aren't the ones ahead in the language AI game right now. Bard/Google may have been close six months ago, but six months is an eternity in this space. Siri/Apple is so far behind that its not looking likely they can catch up. About a week ago a Windows 11 update was shipped which added a Bing AI button to the Windows 11 search bar; but Windows doesn't really drive the zeitgeist. I wonder if 2023/4 is the year for Microsoft to jump back into the smartphone OS game. There may finally be something to the idea of a more minimalist, smaller voice-first smartphone that falls back on the web for application experiences, versus app-first.

s1k3s 4y ago

> and a multi-modal response that will ultimately book my reservation? How is it going to do that? OpenTable's value isn't in the tech, a 15 yo could implement that over the weekend. Or maybe chatGPT can be put in the restaurant, and somehow figure out how to seat you. And then you'd have a human talking to chatGPT and chatGPT talking to another chatGPT to complete the task. That'll be interesting, but otherwise this is overly complicated for all parties involved.