The AI paradigm shift

For one reason or another, my random thoughts on my run yesterday were around how the people interact with the internet and how that’s evolved over time.

In the adoption of the internet in the 1990s and 2000s, users interacted through web pages on desktops or laptops. We’d use Netscape or Internet Explorer to go to a website created on Geocities. In the beginning, everything was static and mostly text based. Things got prettier and more dynamic over time and by the end of the 2000s, we had embedded videos and more interactive websites.

Everything changed with the adoption of mobile in the 2010s. We had armies of product managers and engineers making beautiful responsive webpages and apps. To encourage adoption and use, these apps were gamified and companies got very good at getting you to engage with the app. You needed a beautiful and easy to use app for that, and companies layered on incentives to use that app more.

There’s been an interesting shift in the last few years. While we still live on mobile and apps on a day to day basis, there seems to be a paradigm shift back to the old days of barebones and text based apps. ChatGPT’s website looks basic in black and white, and looks more like a Geocities webstie than let’s say DoorDash’s page.

I do believe both styles are here to stay of course. Tik-Tok and Instagram are still out there and one of the most popular apps in the world. But there seems to be a shift in how users consume information and we may be shifting back slightly back to a traditional text based learning. That will likely change as AI evolves. Voice and video are very interesting and perhaps sooner or later, we’ll have a ChatGPT narrator reading back answers to our prompts.