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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
I really hope they don't merge chat and work. That's kinda the only edge they have over Anthropic at this time point...
Tibo posted yesterday I think it was that this will happen (by the end of the year, was it?)
Prepare to lose essentially unlimited chat mode.
I imagine many will move to claude, as I will (return), unless anthropic makes more blunders.
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).
Human touch still has that finesse and warmth.
He's at openai
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!
Funny to see a blog post about UI from one of the most funded tech companies in the world, yet the player has about the worst UI possible:
- 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?
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.
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.
I find it extremely strange that they're adding GPT-6 Sol to Chat over GPT-6.1 Sol which is significantly more capable.
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
Anecdotally this is what I experienced, do you have sources for this?
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.
Similar to https://www.monogram.ai/.
I guess the above is mostly mobile focused.
Gemini had this UI thing before .
GPT-6's design sense is kind of ridiculous imo.
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...
More UI elements == more tokens == more money for OpenAI
It's a pretty clever way to sell more tokens, I have to admit
Except that chat is a fixed monthly fee. More tokens = more cost for them.
IIRC Google had an experimental project with this kind of stuff 2 years ago, but Google being Google...
1.2B weekly active users? WAU!
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.
The intro video is just lame. Those things never happen in real life.
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.
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.
This seems like a natural progression of models becoming better at frontend coding in general.
"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.
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.
The irony really is that LLMs are partly responsible for the walls and walls of text as seen in the video in the first place.
And now we are asking LLMs to solve it.
Is there any relationship between this and AG-UI or A2UI?
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.
> The compiler allows the interface to appear progressively as the model generates it, without waiting for the entire response to be complete.
why not just stream html?
The element can’t render until it’s closed, presumably.
Html partial streaming is a real thing, presumably
I wish things like bikes came with mostly-written manuals. Maybe a few diagrams. If anything, things are too pictorial these days.
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.
Love it. I've been using $visualize a lot in the codex desktop app, and having even richer experiences will be sweet.
How would a user know whether a generated visualization to illustrate some process is accurate or not?
It wont they're just trying making the chat look like more a session iron man would have with jarvis
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?
So I guess it's going to nail the bicycle the Pelican rides on, right?
"If you call something intelligent you know what it isn't."
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".
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.
Written manuals/guides come with pictures. The ad is dishonest.
Plot twist: The guides were written by ChatGPT. But now you can use ChatGPT to solve problems by ChatGPT.
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.