Big AI models like ChatGPT and Claude get all the attention, but the continually increasing amount of fast, low cost models means today's software can embed little bits of intelligence anywhere they're needed. And when software can think, we can rethink the UI of software.
For most of its history, software has been deterministic. An application's behavior was thought through by developers and hard-coded in: how to check for errors, where to save data, and so on. This rigidity usually made its way to the user interface. Think Web forms with strict input requirements or a limited set of filters for search.
The end result was that people had to adapt their behavior to computers, not the other way around. We learned what little icons meant, remembered which menu item features were in, and tried to resolve (often cryptic) error messages when they came up. Not how most of us would want to spend our day.
Increasingly, though, we have technology that can flip this paradigm on its head. Fast and inexpensive AI models allow software to bend to humans instead. As always, examples help. Search and forms are a huge part of today's software, and both used to force people into computer speak. Today, semantic search replaces a rigid set of filters by turning your question into whatever query syntax is needed behind the scenes.
Multi-modal parsing does the same for input, taking images, documents, or web pages and turning them into the structured entries a database requires.
The common theme in both of these examples is the computer adapting to the human. Instead of making people speak and use computer, computer figures out what people want and gets it done. Add enough bits of intelligence into software and the process of using software becomes dramatically different.
The vision I keep coming back to (minus the bowtie) that illustrates just how different is Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator video. Put simply, it makes computing... natural.
There's no voice commands to memorize, it uses natural language. There's no query syntax to learn, it uses fuzzy search. There's no cursors, it uses direct manipulation through touch. All this together lets people act like people, not like computers. Which has always been the goal.