Artificial intelligence has sparked a whirlwind of apps and projects popping up from every corner of the internet. It's an exciting time to be alive. But, what will remain after this hype dies down?

What’s going on with AI today?

So far, in every break-through, what has stuck around is what has made users' lives easier. However it’s not at all clear that AI in general, or generative AI has made our life easier just yet.

In this case, tons of apps are emerging that are super exciting. They're really impressive to see, and they can even entertain for a long time while you play around with them. But the truth is, it's hard for them to actually change our lives, our daily routines, our work, or our interactions with our loved ones, at scale. For millions¹.

One of the standout examples of this movement is the web apps photo.ai or interior.ai by levelsio, a famous indie hacker that seems to make most of their living on coding and traveling the world. While these apps are mind boggling² and they do seem like magic, what are the real chances they end up changing your life? How frequently does an average person get a headshot? How often do you redesign your house, and actually do the renovation?

These changes go no further than fashion or design in it’s broadest sense goes. Recent events suggest a somewhat limited impact of artificial intelligence (AI) based on the creative industries where it can indeed have a huge impact. The AI's role is primarily as a tool for enhancing efficiency and reducing costs in professions that have a creative edge. By streamlining workflows and offering new methods for creating and modifying work, AI provides significant benefits in these fields. Photographers can leverage AI for tasks like image editing and sorting, while interior designers can use AI to create and adjust designs more quickly.

However, this viewpoint might underplay the broader potential implications of AI. Beyond mere efficiency, AI can profoundly influence creativity, enabling artists to explore new forms of expression and innovate in ways previously unimaginable. It can also democratize these fields, making tools and techniques accessible to a wider range of people, potentially leading to a surge in creativity and diversity in these industries.

Will AI become mainstream?

Behind the scenes, it has already started to be mainstream, however, the real breakthrough will happen – not so slowly – as LLMs make their way to human devices. Throughout this decade we will see how a interface is born, one that has been depicted in science fiction in so many ways.

The way we interact with machines so far is quite diverse. Various systems have tried to simplify the human-machine interface with a doubtful success rate.

If you think about the recent changes in human history ever since technology started to make its way to more people, big changes have always been built on new interfaces human-machine. None of the big inventions that later became a turning point in their industry were the first to be built, yet all were done the right way. Internet changed the way humans interfaced with knowledge and peers. Cell-phones the way humans interacted with one another. the iPhone and tactile devices the way we interacted with the internet and one another, again. A revolution that sped up social networking – yet another invention that changed the way we interacted amongst each other, again. While cryptocurrencies was the promising change to how we exchange value in the 2010 decade, we are yet to see that shake the pillars of traditional value exchange beyond traders and snake oil salesmen.

More than a decade has passed since Siri premiered, with Google to follow a few years later. While Apple’s assistant has proven to have a more limited functionality through the years than Google’s, both have a narrow set of features that do not replace manual intervention to interface with your mobile phone.

LLMs are here to turn that upside down. As soon as Apple or Google embed LLMs into their system, a new era of mobile interaction will arise. They will be able to start understanding you properly regardless of the request, offering alternatives, and being constantly retrained in-place, or in the cloud to offer better and better performance month over month, without the need to wait for a new year release of the main software that helps run your cell phone.

You will be able to interact with your device using no more than your voice. Reliably. This is no small achievement, it will change the way you interact with that little screen, giving your brain some space – less chances of seeing unwanted notifications every time you reach out to add an item to the grocery list. Lower probabilities of compulsively clicking on your social app of choice when you want to look something up in wikipedia while traveling.

As an experiment, I suggest you use ChatGPTs voice conversation feature and start of with something like “I am at the foot of the Alhambra on the Paseo de los Tristes. What can you tell me as an expert tourist guide in the city of Granada?”

1. There are many more examples: https://visualizee.ai/,
2. I have not tried Photo AI and can only judge by examples and comments on twitter.