A lot of this seems like a nerd’s fantasy. I share these fantasies / desires, but I don’t think its a sober, realistic take on what’s most likely.
> Even if an LLM could provide me with a recipe that perfectly suits what I’m looking for, I wouldn’t want to give up the experience of using a recipe search engine and browsing through a large collection of recipes.
Me too, but allrecipes.com has already switched from “search for what you want” to “we’ll tell you what you want”. This is a UX pattern that I hate but has proven a winner across many apps lately - e.g. TikTok. Streaming music still allows you to build playlists of specific songs, but auto-built radio stations are filled with a suspicious amount of whatever the major labels are pushing this quarter. Netflix/etc has shockingly fuzzy search which largely pushes whatever they want you to watch rather than what you’re searching for. YouTube is mostly also push rather than pull today.
I expect everything to continue moving that direction, against the wishes of the power users. The majority of users seem to go for the simpler UX, even if they sometimes complain about quality.
> In an ideal world, I’d like to have the underlying model be a swappable implementation detail. Llama 2 and similar developments make me optimistic.
This is a pipe dream. LLMs may be hot-swappable by developers but for 99% of apps + OSes this wont be a user-configurable thing.
Author of the piece, and I... can't really argue with any of this, tbh. I'll admit both those parts you called out were probably heavily tinged by my own desires, and your more-sober predictions are a very reasonable counterargument for what will happen in the general case. I suppose, especially regarding swappable LLMs, I _do_ only expect it to be an option for devs or sophisticated users; I assume that most folks probably wouldn't care, I'm just hoping there's enough of us that do care that at least some options offer that swappable functionality. Fwiw, I also use Linux (Fedora) as my daily-driver, and I'd be more than content if the predictions from this post came true in a similar vein, e.g. as an OSS option (or family of OSS options) that some subset of users can opt to use.
> Me too, but allrecipes.com has already switched from “search for what you want” to “we’ll tell you what you want”.
has anybody ever heard of a cookbook? it's the perfect ux for this. especially if you have a lot of different ones. even better if you collection is mostly physical copies.
Yes but Allrecipes.com didn't cost me hundreds of dollars to get 20-30 high quality cookbooks and had 10,000+ recipes. More importantly, I could trust that the highest-rated recipes, while not necessarily the "best", would be stupid-proof. The only way that recipes got universally high feedback from the average home cook on allrecipes.com is if you could accidentally double or halve any ingredient and it would still taste good. Cookbooks often contain recipes which, while better, are also more particular and require a higher skill floor.
I could also quickly filter against recipes which contained ingredients I didn't like, or filter for recipes which used ingredients I already have on hand.
OP here, as someone who does love cooking, I've gone down this route pretty heavily in the last few years - been growing my collection of physical cookbooks and definitely enjoy flipping through them in search of inspiration. So, yeah, very much endorse the cookbook UX!
> Even if an LLM could provide me with a recipe that perfectly suits what I’m looking for, I wouldn’t want to give up the experience of using a recipe search engine and browsing through a large collection of recipes.
Me too, but allrecipes.com has already switched from “search for what you want” to “we’ll tell you what you want”. This is a UX pattern that I hate but has proven a winner across many apps lately - e.g. TikTok. Streaming music still allows you to build playlists of specific songs, but auto-built radio stations are filled with a suspicious amount of whatever the major labels are pushing this quarter. Netflix/etc has shockingly fuzzy search which largely pushes whatever they want you to watch rather than what you’re searching for. YouTube is mostly also push rather than pull today.
I expect everything to continue moving that direction, against the wishes of the power users. The majority of users seem to go for the simpler UX, even if they sometimes complain about quality.
> In an ideal world, I’d like to have the underlying model be a swappable implementation detail. Llama 2 and similar developments make me optimistic.
This is a pipe dream. LLMs may be hot-swappable by developers but for 99% of apps + OSes this wont be a user-configurable thing.