I'm not a fan of OpenAI / Sam Altman, but I love their blog posts. The team and whoever decides how to do these presentations, is on point. The only other company that has amazing release pages like this is Apple, I think I remember hearing that they probably hired someone from apple who used to do release blog posts there too.
What's funny about "Intelligent UI" is I said like 2 or more years ago, that these AI companies need to start thinking outside of these basic chat UIs, they do some things here and there, but its really depressing how little they do to innovate in these spaces. Same with the coding harnesses, the UI for all these things could be drastically superior.
You could say the same thing about Anthropic because I don't really see much differences. Not sure about amazing part but both are high quality and I probably like Anthropic's aesthetic more
Why did they bother hiring someone to write at all? I certainly wouldn't invest $1T into a company with so little confidence in their product. When the chips are down and they need to write something important, they DON'T use AI?
That's just picking a fight. Whatever we think about how amazing or terrible AI is, it's pretty reasonable to understand it is quite literally the weighted average of humanity's output.
Also reasonable: it's possible to hire a world-class ___ to do that job better than AI.
I take the opposite viewpoint. I think pages like these are horrible, and a demonstration that web designers have too many tools at their disposal.
But this is just a marketing page for some tech company, right? If only it stopped there. I have to deal with this nonsense in news "articles" as well on occasion, when some web designer intern is allowed to larp as a journalist for a day.
I find the Sunday roast comparison of 5.6 vs 6 very interesting. I have no doubt most people will prefer 6, yet I am almost repulsed by all the images, so much needless whitespace, checklist and so on. Feels like I'm being condescended to and treated like a child.
Given that OpenAI is making noises about merging work with chat (a horrible idea imo), and Work is very similar to Codex... I dearly hope things like these won't have any meaningful cross-polination into the actual work tools.
Seeing that the chat is based on 6.0 and not 6.1 is disappointing. The "Visual and interactive explanations" seems genuinely useful, but 6.1 is just so much better. I wouldn't truly trust the 6.1 with the explanations, but I'd trust them a fair bit more than 6.0. I understand that compute isn't infinite, but tons of people only interact with the chat and having your "things-explainer" be as good as it can be is important when people increasingly treat AI models as the source of truth, or even use them for academic learning and whatnot.
Still, the models will improve, so the visual explainer seems pretty good as an idea / mvp.
Yeah it reminds me of one those obnoxious recipe/biography websites that is the laughingstock of the internet. Why would I possibly want an AI image of a imaginary roast once I'm already at the recipe stage?
Kinda just feels like google search results in AI, which imo is a step down from distilled information. Chatgpt is already able to generate charts and visuals upon request.
It's insane how hard OAI is choking, they had much better models than A/ who were fumbling this year to date... then blunder after blunder.
The only things that OAI still have over A/ are better coding agent GUI, no 5hr limit on >$100, much more reasonable cybersec guardrails (that allow most RE work) and... that's it.
I don't like either. I'd want a recipe that could fit on a single page with type. Recipes you find on Google actively hide the ingredient list and simple procedures to get more of the user's time to monetize but I don't know why ChatGPT needs to be verbose here. Recipes are simple things. Simple search solved find recipes back in the early 2000s and it's prime example of a thing people have been enshitifying since there's not much to really give people beyond the formula. And sure, every entrepreneur screams "they think they want a formula but really they want an experience" but, no I don't.
Of everything that could be automated, Bartosz Ciechanowski really was the last on my list.
In all seriousness, his lovingly and expertly crafted explainers are still going to age like a handcrafted heirloom clock in a world of plastic-clad quartz movements. But it’s absolutely incredible that we are now in an age where a computer can manufacture a serviceable interactive explainer on whatever niche topic you desire.
The reason why B.C. became a thing is because the art of drafting died from CAD. The attention to detail, the minutae of walking the reader through a highly sophisticated thing was replaced by short-form video explanations. His work is very much a callback to the days of old. So too, is his turn to be relegated to a relic of his time.
Also, it's hand coded WebGL. It's smooth, faultless and has no peers.
> So too, is his turn to be relegated to a relic of his time.
No, it'll be tasteful artifact, not a relic. Records, fountain pens and automatic watches did not die. They are used by people who discern things, and no, none of these things have to be expensive (i.e. Neither Seiko 5, nor Lamy Safari are expensive, yet they are as dependable as their 100x expensive brethren).
I've had the most success with GPT explaining things to me by making it take a few sentences at a time back and forth, instead of reading full write-ups of whatever I asked. It also often poisons the conversation if it misunderstood some part of the question, and I can lead it better by continuously questioning its statements. It's also more engaging that way.
I've been learning music lately and it kept re-pasting the same one chord visualization throughout many conversations, almost randomly and often barely related to the question. So I at least hope this won't be as aggressive so I can prompt it away!
I've been calling this "disposable UI" or "paper plate UI", eg something meant to be used once. One thing I'll be curious about is overzealousness to produce this, when sometimes what you want is just a simple response. Overall though I'm a big fan of it, if it can be provided fast enough. I'd be curious on how much impact it has on latency of a response.
I'm curious to see how useful this is. I feel like in practice the existing versions of this feel like they get in the way. While I'm sure I've had some situations where a visual would be helpful, there are two situations where I do not want it:
1) I want a quick answer, and I don't care for the boilerplate UI. For example, if I ask how to make pancakes, I make them all the time and just want to a quick reminder on the ratios, but it might trigger a full UI that I need to sort through to find information.
2) If I ask a to me unrelated to UI question and it triggers a big UI build that is completely off topic for my question (meaning I'm desperately pressing the stop button and prepping rewriting my query)
Or the other one I see, for example if I look up a unix command like:
"ls all hidden files in the /xxx directory"
And I get back:
"Sorry, I am am unable to find /xxx in my current environment"
We are becoming more and more as a tool for sth to be done rather than the brain behind it. At least I start to feel this way. The joy of discovery, exploration and experiencing at first hand... It is slowly diminishing for the perfection of the quick outcome.
6.1 is Astra minor. Way more capable but also way heavier+slower. Its really 2 different models, they just shipped it as sol to recover from the gpt6 disaster lunch, where they tried to pass terra 6(or a cheaper model) as sol but it was worse than expected
It's purely circumstantial, but 6 Sol supports no reasoning (same as 6 Luna and 5.6 Sol/Luna), while both Astra and 6.1 Sol do not support "reasoning = none".
I really don't like having to open Work sessions for one-off questions, only because they're limiting what models they put in the chat. The older models are just too dumb for some things.
The whole Work/Chat/Codex split is maddening in the way it's implemented. It's a pain to switch back to the right project, it's a pain to switch forward, it's a pain to try to remember which chat was in what.
I’ve hit model not available limits for GPT 6.1 Sol multiple times over the last week. It’s never for very long, and I can switch to Astra, but it seems like OpenAI is struggling with capacity. This has happened with my personal $200 Pro connection and my Codex enterprise connection.
Given the extreme short time between 6 Sol and 6.1 Sol, I suspect they don’t actually have much in common and 6.1 is a heavier model rebranded as Sol in a panic response to poor agentic capabilities of 6.
I suspect that 6 sol was a better version of 5.6 terra (and note that in the 6 sol and luna release, they took out terra, and price 6 sol at 5.6 terra pricing), then the backlash from lesser capabilities made them roll out 6.1 sol as the actual 5.6 sol - size modee.
Why show an intelligent UI within a chat interface. That’s pathetically lame. Better to go away from chat interfaces to rich visual interfaces. Doesn’t sound intelligent at all to me
This seems like an expansion on something I was getting my agent to do which is use 'cards' to communicate using things like tables, rather than the ascii table stuff Claude code likes to do.
Unsure if this has been done already but the best thing I did was get it to create a list of next steps as quick buttons that it keeps updated in a docked card. It works well but occasionally gets stuck on some un related rabbit hole.
They seem to be pitching something that pretty much all the decent models can already do..?
Obviously if your model is stuck inside a CLI terminal, then not so much. But in a GUI harness (shameless plug for my own one: https://juggler.studio, but I assume others can do this too), you just ask them to answer in HTML and they'll happily draw pretty pictures inline in the conversation. I've been doing this for ages with claude, GPT, Deepseek and others.
There have been recent developments that allow people to interpret Swift on device, live. With this new launch, will the AI be able to write native code and compile it on device? That would be super cool.
AFAIK, they already had a simpler form of this. It was kind of an obvious next step. Now connect it up to tools so that we can again comfortably do the things that are more precise by hand! The “pick a color” or “select the width on a slider” use case is coming closer.
In the video, they showed examples of ChatGPT making interactive tutorials on how to fold origami, how to arrange colours/interior and how to assemble a bike.
Supposedly, people were struggling to follow written manuals and they needed an interactive explanations.
I'm not a mathematician and I would certainly love having a tool that would do ELI5 on some complex stuff, but I'm really worrying about using this too often and outsourcing my ability to do stuff to some mega corp.
Is this OpenAI catching up with Anthropic artifacts? At the same time they say "We’ve trained GPT‑6 to compose responses using text, visuals and interactive elements...", rather than a harness.
If the diagrams and descriptions are actually well-designed and written, I'd far prefer those. Especially one where I can ask clarifying questions. I'd much prefer a Haynes with some of the images lightly animated than having a 10 minute long video with a long intro for monetization reasons about how to do some simple thing where you can barely see what the mechanic is actually doing in the cramped, poorly lit, 360p video is trying to look at.
But getting actual service manuals cheap/free these days can be tricky, and their quality can leave a good bit to be desired.
I gotta admit, I love how their design system and how they market things. It looks so good. However the true state of their toolings is closer to a burning dumpster fire. If you look at Codex Github repo for example, the amount of existing issues and continuously new issues appearing while tagged releases is being spewed out. Its truly a nightmare. Their vscode extension has been broken for almost 1 week now, if not more. Its instead a community effort to repair it.
It makes sense they’re doing this - I’ve noticed lately when asking a more complex question involving a lot of nonlinear data using Codex work mode, Astra and Sol will write a fully html document to better display the info with a Cliff’s Notes version in chat.
I'm also building something similar for an internal project, based on the vercel's json-render design. It hasn't been too challenging, especially since the release of faster models like 5.6 Luna.
I read the comments here and I am really surprised by many people. One picture is worth a thousand words so with better UI you can make much better user experiences. This unlocks personal assistants to be better adopted by elderly or disabled people. I see so many benefits of it and having models which can do this (if they can do it constantly with good quality) is amazing. Much better products - I am really tired of dumb chatbot - if I can do something with one button or view the whole information in one diagram/image, this is amazing.
> We’ve trained GPT‑6 to compose responses using text, visuals and interactive elements, choosing how they fit together based on your question.
Ok so this is how you build a moat. Models are not a commodity and visualization isnt a purely harness problem.
> We expanded our training methods to help the model make thoughtful decisions about content, layout, visuals, and interaction. This included evaluating the interfaces it creates for clarity, usefulness, and completeness. GPT‑6 learned to use the component library and make good design decisions, including how to organize information clearly, when to use interactivity, and when a simple text response is enough.
Curious to know how they trained it produce appropriate visuals. And why that cant be done with propmt engineering.
They're making the point—apparently too subtly—that text alone is a highly limiting "UI" for many tasks. So it's great that GPT-6 can now communicate in a a richer interactive medium.
So you never have to assemble a bike or paint a room. How those are not real world examples?
I find their video pretty cool. For people with ADHD or people learning by watching or children this is spot on.
They made fake, terrible artifacts (colorless paint chips, text-only city guides and instruction manuals) to show how terrible that is, and then "fixed" them. The problem is, in reality their examples don't exist. Paint chips have color samples. City guides have maps, pictures, and color. Instruction manuals almost always have illustrations. If what you made is better than what exists, you should compare it to what exists and not some alternate reality.
I feel like I'm going mad looking at this page. The bike disassembly looks fake to me, like an alien would show presumed bike parts, but I can't tell why and don't know much about bikes. Maybe it's because there are no screws and nuts?
What is it supposed to demonstrate? That the model knows some kind of folk mereology?
Gemini has been doing what OpenAI are calling "Intelligent UI" for a long time now but I never noticed a fancy blog post about it. I have no idea when they added it, but have had the LLM pop it up for me unprompted occasionally for many months
FWIW, I have no 'dog in the race' here, no brand loyalty. I dabble with all the models and find them all to be roughly about the same generally, depending upon which day of the week it is and who released their latest model most recently, etc.
Is it me or GPT-6 Instant food answer gives the vibe to check the hell out immediately? It's like the it will start to explain a sunny Sunday afternoon from 20 years ago for 5 full pages.
The point, I think, is to make fun of Anthropic models, which answer only in text when you ask them how to do something. They’re the competition, not paper pamphlets.
I made a prediction last year that there'd be a new UI protocol (like HTML) but for agents. I believe that custom or personalised UI's are going to be the new browser interface. More radically, I think browsers can be completely replaced. My news feed can be personalised to me, based on what AI thinks might be important from all sources like Reddit, X, HN.
Which brings up a different problem: personalized reading UI, personalized writing UI, how are those services going to pay their bills? Maybe they can sell access to their APIs but who's really going to buy that? Those services will die and will be replaced by some other service that will be born to serve those people.
Or, more probably IMHO, most people will keep using the standard UIs because they are ready and they need no work to build.
This looks bad, I want the output to be as much as text based so I can easily export it and further processing it, plus, this might make the resource-eating app even worse.
Visuals are better for consumers/general public, when the use case is "help me cook X meal", or "where can I stop by to buy gas on the way to San Jose".
What's funny about "Intelligent UI" is I said like 2 or more years ago, that these AI companies need to start thinking outside of these basic chat UIs, they do some things here and there, but its really depressing how little they do to innovate in these spaces. Same with the coding harnesses, the UI for all these things could be drastically superior.
Also reasonable: it's possible to hire a world-class ___ to do that job better than AI.
But this is just a marketing page for some tech company, right? If only it stopped there. I have to deal with this nonsense in news "articles" as well on occasion, when some web designer intern is allowed to larp as a journalist for a day.
sigh Just give me text to read.
Given that OpenAI is making noises about merging work with chat (a horrible idea imo), and Work is very similar to Codex... I dearly hope things like these won't have any meaningful cross-polination into the actual work tools.
Seeing that the chat is based on 6.0 and not 6.1 is disappointing. The "Visual and interactive explanations" seems genuinely useful, but 6.1 is just so much better. I wouldn't truly trust the 6.1 with the explanations, but I'd trust them a fair bit more than 6.0. I understand that compute isn't infinite, but tons of people only interact with the chat and having your "things-explainer" be as good as it can be is important when people increasingly treat AI models as the source of truth, or even use them for academic learning and whatnot.
Still, the models will improve, so the visual explainer seems pretty good as an idea / mvp.
Kinda just feels like google search results in AI, which imo is a step down from distilled information. Chatgpt is already able to generate charts and visuals upon request.
Prepare to lose essentially unlimited chat mode.
I imagine many will move to claude, as I will (return), unless anthropic makes more blunders.
Random link I found looking for the twitter post
https://pasqualepillitteri.it/en/news/21024/openai-merge-cha...
The only things that OAI still have over A/ are better coding agent GUI, no 5hr limit on >$100, much more reasonable cybersec guardrails (that allow most RE work) and... that's it.
In all seriousness, his lovingly and expertly crafted explainers are still going to age like a handcrafted heirloom clock in a world of plastic-clad quartz movements. But it’s absolutely incredible that we are now in an age where a computer can manufacture a serviceable interactive explainer on whatever niche topic you desire.
> So too, is his turn to be relegated to a relic of his time.
No, it'll be tasteful artifact, not a relic. Records, fountain pens and automatic watches did not die. They are used by people who discern things, and no, none of these things have to be expensive (i.e. Neither Seiko 5, nor Lamy Safari are expensive, yet they are as dependable as their 100x expensive brethren).
Human touch still has that finesse and warmth.
I've been learning music lately and it kept re-pasting the same one chord visualization throughout many conversations, almost randomly and often barely related to the question. So I at least hope this won't be as aggressive so I can prompt it away!
1) I want a quick answer, and I don't care for the boilerplate UI. For example, if I ask how to make pancakes, I make them all the time and just want to a quick reminder on the ratios, but it might trigger a full UI that I need to sort through to find information.
2) If I ask a to me unrelated to UI question and it triggers a big UI build that is completely off topic for my question (meaning I'm desperately pressing the stop button and prepping rewriting my query)
Or the other one I see, for example if I look up a unix command like:
"ls all hidden files in the /xxx directory"
And I get back:
"Sorry, I am am unable to find /xxx in my current environment"
I have explicit instructions to tone it down. Less taglines, eyebrow text, subheadings, decorative spacing, pills, cards.
Hopefully this doesn't bleed into the chat...
It's a pretty clever way to sell more tokens, I have to admit
- Audio volume has 2 levels: on and off
- Play button worked exactly once for me: it played and looped the video. Couldn't be stopped afterwards.
- The video progress bar has no visual indication of where it starts and where it ends..
Is this what Phind died for?
Unsure if this has been done already but the best thing I did was get it to create a list of next steps as quick buttons that it keeps updated in a docked card. It works well but occasionally gets stuck on some un related rabbit hole.
Obviously if your model is stuck inside a CLI terminal, then not so much. But in a GUI harness (shameless plug for my own one: https://juggler.studio, but I assume others can do this too), you just ask them to answer in HTML and they'll happily draw pretty pictures inline in the conversation. I've been doing this for ages with claude, GPT, Deepseek and others.
Supposedly, people were struggling to follow written manuals and they needed an interactive explanations.
I'm not a mathematician and I would certainly love having a tool that would do ELI5 on some complex stuff, but I'm really worrying about using this too often and outsourcing my ability to do stuff to some mega corp.
This is now trying to steal YouTube repair and cooking videos. Here is news for you: People prefer YouTube repair and cooking videos.
But getting actual service manuals cheap/free these days can be tricky, and their quality can leave a good bit to be desired.
I guess the above is mostly mobile focused.
"Here is a library of [svelte/react/whatever] components, use them to construct a helpful visual to demonstrate your point."
The deconstructed bike at the beginning was in a class of its own, however.
And now we are asking LLMs to solve it.
why not just stream html?
Ok so this is how you build a moat. Models are not a commodity and visualization isnt a purely harness problem.
> We expanded our training methods to help the model make thoughtful decisions about content, layout, visuals, and interaction. This included evaluating the interfaces it creates for clarity, usefulness, and completeness. GPT‑6 learned to use the component library and make good design decisions, including how to organize information clearly, when to use interactivity, and when a simple text response is enough.
Curious to know how they trained it produce appropriate visuals. And why that cant be done with propmt engineering.
What is it supposed to demonstrate? That the model knows some kind of folk mereology?
Remember when Steve said ‘the computer for the rest of us?’ We’re seeing that here.
I suspect it will struggle with anything that isn't simple enough for demo-mode or lifestyle fluff.
FWIW, I have no 'dog in the race' here, no brand loyalty. I dabble with all the models and find them all to be roughly about the same generally, depending upon which day of the week it is and who released their latest model most recently, etc.
This is false.
Or, more probably IMHO, most people will keep using the standard UIs because they are ready and they need no work to build.
Now they extracted the value from interoperable open systems, they would love to replace it with closed proprietary systems.