Good points - but I fundamentally disagree here.

The whole ecosystem, culture and metaphor of having a 'device' with 'apps' is to enable access to a range of solutions to your various problems.

This is all going to go away.

Yes, there will always be exceptions and sometimes you need the physical features of the device - like for taking photos.

Instead, you'll have one channel which can solve 95% of your issues - basically like having a personalised, on-call assistant for everyone on the planet.

Consider the friction when consumers grumble about streaming services fragmenting. They just want one. They don't want to subscribe to 5+.

In 10 years, kids will look back and wonder why on earth we used to have these 'phones' with dozens or hundreds of apps installed. 'Why would you do that? That is so much work? How do you know which you need to use?'

If there was one company worrying about change, I would think it would actually be Apple. The iPhone has long been a huge driver of sales and growth - as increasing performance requirements have pushed consumers to upgrade. Instead, I think the increasing relevance of AI tools will inverse this. Consumers will be looking for smaller, lighter, harder-wearing devices. Why do you need a 'phone' with more power? You just need to be able to speak to the AI.

I was thinking the same way, but here's where I could imagine things being different this time (Fully aware that I just like anyone else is just guessing about where we'll end up)

- Discoverability. I think we'll move into a situation where the AI will have the context to know what you will want to purchase. It'll read out the order and the specials and you just confirm or indicate that you'd like to browse more options. (In which case the Chat window could include an embedded catalogue of items)

- Cost/availability - With the amount of people working in this area, I don't think it'll be too long before we're able to get a lighter weight model that can run locally on most smart phones.

- Branding - This is a good point, but also, I imagine a brand is more likely to let itself get eaten, if the return will be a constant supply of customers.

- Monetization - The entire model will change, in the sense that AI platforms will revenue share with the platforms they integrate with to create a mutually beneficial relationship with the suppliers of content. (Since they can't exist without the content both existing and being relevant)

> LLMs can’t run locally yet.

"Yet" is a big word here when it comes to the field as a whole. I got Alpaca-LoRA up and running on my desktop machine with a 3080 the other day and I'd say it's about 50% as good as ChatGPT 3.5 and fast enough to already be usable for most minor things ("summarize this text", etc) if only the available UIs were better.

I feel like we're not far off from the point where it'll be possible to buy something of ChatGPT 3.5 quality as a home hardware appliance that can then hook into a bunch of things.

I think you're missing the fact that the LLM could also generate the frontend on the fly by e.g. spitting out frontend code in a markup language like QML. What's a multi-activity Android app if not an elaborate notebook? Branding can just be a parameter.

Sure, maybe OpenTable would like to retain control. But they'll probably just use the AI API to implement that control and run the app.

Chat can be an interface, but its also essentially a universal programming language which can be put behind (or generate itself) any kind of interface.

Who's to say though that it'll always stay a text format.

They could bring in calendar, payment, other UI functionality...

Basically they could rethink how everything is done on the Web today.

>The conversational UI is a lot less convenient to include advertisements

How so? Surely people are going to ask this thing for product recommendations, just recommend your sponsors.