Text Is the Universal Interface

The most complicated reasoning programs in the world can be defined as a textual I/O stream to a leviathan living on some technology company’s servers. Engineers can work on improving the quality and cost of these programs. They can be modular, recombined, and, unlike typical UNIX shell programs, are able to recover from user errors. Like shell programs living on through the ages and becoming more powerful as underlying hardware gets better, prompted models become smarter and more on task as the underlying language model becomes smarter. It’s possible that in the near future all computer interfaces that require bespoke negotiations will pay a small tax to the gatekeeper of a large language model for the sheer leverage it gives an operator: a new bicycle for the mind.

I have a fairly lengthy backlog of Instapaper articles that I’m combing through, and I prefer to consume them in reverse chronological order.

This article is roughly 10 months old, and it’s funny how out of date it already feels (remember when GPT-3 was state of the art?).

But more importantly, the conceit of the article is still spot on. The internet (hell, pretty much all computers) are built on thousands of tiny programs, each programmed to do one specific task extremely well, interoperating together to do something big.

It’s like an orchestra. A superstar violinist really shines when they are accompanied by the multi-faceted tones of equally competent bassoonists, cellists, and timpanists.