Comment by mfkhalil
2 days ago
I actually completely agree with this. Search is a good example, but in general it seems that general consensus has become that consumers don't know what they want, which is pretty frustrating, and probably a product of the success of the TikTok algorithm and similar software.
I'm hoping that as LLMs become more mainstream more functionality is built into tech that doesn't treat consumers as idiots. This is one stab at it, but there's so many other opportunities imo.
How do you think that LLMs will help that?
Because LLMs understand language, we can start building algorithms that respond to what users say they want. Instead of reverse-engineering user intent from behavior, you can just tell a system “more of X, less of Y” and it listens. Way more flexible than hard-coded workflows.
Interesting. That doesn't align with my experience with LLMs. I tend to find "smarter" interfaces (like LLM-based ones) more frustrating because they are black boxes and I find myself struggling to understand how to get what I want from them. I've had a fair number of maddening conversations with LLMs where I ask them for something and they just regurgitate non-answers back over and over.
What I prefer is interfaces that are more systematic and based on comprehensible principles. Like, for search (as someone mentioned in another comment), I want to be able to search for pages (or records, or whatever) that contain the text I searched for. I don't want an interface that tries to understand what I mean, I just want it to use the data I give it in a way that's deterministic enough that I can figure out how to make it do what I want.
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