The post-smartphone era is coming.

For over a decade, we've used these silo'ed apps to get things done on smartphones. But new developments with generative AI are showing a new direction. Agents will be able to process more natural language input that is more high level, and will be able to dynamically complete actions. In the last 100 years we've come up with countless ways to interact with computers as best as we could: cli, keyboards, mouse, guis, touch screens... But now, for the first time, we will be able to create a more intuitive interface that is similar to the way we communicate with other entities of our own species: humans.

This I think, is the most intuitive interface possible: one that resembles the way we interact with other humans: the interface of spoken natural language.

Of course we've seen this interface before with apps like Siri and Alexa, but now this interface will greatly improve with LLMs: We're seeing the first shimmers of this new interface in 2024 with SDKs like Bland, Vapi, and Deepgram. Monday, May 13th 2024, OpenAI launched GPT4o that slahed the response time of end to end voice interactions with agnets from subsecond to 200-300ms by training an LLM end-to-end with vision, audio, and text side-by-side. Now we're talking!

Companies like OpenAI and Cognition are building agent-based knowledge workers in all kinds of niche professions. Marketing, Sales, SEO, Programming, Research, it doesn't matter: we're seeing startups pop up in all niches of knowledge work. If we really can get to a level of reasoning and autonomy that is similar to that of humans, it won't be long before we have covered most knowledge work.

The way we interact with computers will be more from the sidelines, computers will use themselves and each other, we just talk with them in our own language.

Away with the fences

I hate fences. They only have one purpose and that is to create a boundary that is not easy to cross.

Fences are everywhere and they are not only physical. Especially in business there have traditionally been lots of boundaries and they're usually there to protect some sort of IP from being stolen.

Lots of IP is now knowledge-based. But knowledge-work is gonna be scaled into infinity right?

Open source is a great example of when we drop a fence: in this case, the fence of not sharing your software with others, it actually gives you a great advantage: Because you give away so much value for free, people love you for it and bring you customers in the long run.

My paradigm I want to go all in on is exactly this, but I have a strong feeling we can make this paradigm exponentially stronger somehow. How can we erradicate the fences? I'm gonna find out.

Open source always stays in the back but it seems that in order to get into frontend, marketing, and business, we always ditch the openness and build the more traditional fences again.

My hunch is, however, that now we can have agents working for us rather than people. Agents are programs and these can be replicated just like other code. They can be open source. People cannot be open source. By design, our brain is not very transparent. We cannot copy ourselves.

So maybe this is why open source is getting big.

Very big.