ChatGPT has 400 million weekly active users, up from 100 million in November 2023. This isn’t just growth—it’s a fundamental shift in how people expect to interact with software. We’re witnessing the rise of the chat interface as the primary way users communicate with computers, and it’s reshaping product development entirely.
The Chat Interface Revolution #
More people are choosing to communicate with computers via text—either by speaking, writing, or reading—rather than navigating traditional GUIs. Large language models have become the enabler of this transformation, turning natural language into a viable interface for complex interactions.
The cost of inference has dropped 100x over the past two years, and commodity market dynamics continue driving costs down. What was once expensive and exclusive is becoming ubiquitous. The result? Intelligence is proliferating into use-cases we never imagined, displacing human effort at an unprecedented rate.
But this is just the beginning.
Beyond Chat: Multimodal Experiences #
The future isn’t purely text-based. We’re heading toward something closer to Star Trek—multimodal interactions where voice, text, and traditional UI elements merge into seamless experiences. Not everything translates well to text. Visual representations—buttons, diagrams, layouts—still excel at certain tasks. The magic happens when these modalities combine.
Picture uploading a file that needs specific formatting. Instead of wrestling with documentation, an intelligent system understands your intent, reasons about the schema requirements, and either fixes the format automatically or guides you through the process. That reasoning, previously requiring human intervention, becomes automated and cheap.
Commoditized Reasoning Changes Everything #
Here’s where things get interesting: we’re not just changing user interfaces, we’re embedding reasoning into every part of applications. Previously, humans were the only source of contextual problem-solving within software systems. Now, basic reasoning is becoming commoditized.
This shift means that at every interaction point, an intelligent reasoning machine will try to understand your goals and guide you toward achieving them. The file uploader that automatically handles format issues. The form that anticipates what you’re trying to accomplish. The dashboard that surfaces exactly the data you need based on your current task.
What took human customer support, documentation, and manual intervention can now be handled by systems that reason about context, understand intent, and provide solutions.
The Displacement Question #
This commoditization of reasoning will displace human work—there’s no avoiding that reality. Tasks that required human intelligence and context-switching will become automated. But there’s an optimistic angle here: humans can move to more interesting, fulfilling work while machines handle the repetitive reasoning tasks.
Looking Forward #
In ten years, I expect we’ll all be speaking to our products while simultaneously interacting with rich visual interfaces. Every software tool will have reasoning embedded throughout the user journey. The line between “AI features” and “regular features” will disappear because intelligence will be table stakes.
This isn’t about building chatbots or adding AI widgets to existing products. It’s about fundamentally rethinking how software understands and responds to human needs. The companies that get this right will create experiences that feel almost magical—where the software anticipates, adapts, and assists at every step.
The chat interface was just the beginning. What comes next will be far more interesting.