<story><title>Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don&apos;t load any faster</title><url>https://www.datafantic.com/how-much-time-do-we-waste-waiting-for-websites-to-load/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>modeless</author><text>I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents.&lt;p&gt;Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we&amp;#x27;ll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the clicking for us, and summarize the results in a much simpler UI designed to actually be fast and useful, vs. designed to optimize the business metrics of some company as interpreted by a gaggle of product managers.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t unprecedented. Plaid screen scrapes terrible bank websites and turns them into APIs, though without AI. Google Duplex uses AI to turn restaurant phone numbers into an API for making reservations. DeepMind&amp;#x27;s Sparrow[1], just announced today, answers factual questions posed in plain English by performing Google searches and summarizing the results. But it&amp;#x27;s going to be a revolution when it becomes much more general and able to take actions rather than just summarize information. It isn&amp;#x27;t far off! &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adept.ai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adept.ai&lt;/a&gt; is pretty much exactly what I&amp;#x27;m talking about, and I expect there are a lot more people working on similar things that are still in stealth mode.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.deepmind.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;building-safer-dialogue-agents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.deepmind.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;building-safer-dialogue-agents&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>makeitdouble</author><text>You mention it in your response, but this whole paradigm looks like an extension of what we have with Google Search.&lt;p&gt;And Google Search is so utterly weak. Not just because of the neutering of search options or the weird priority conflict inside Google, but just because even with litteraly all the data in the world about a specific user it doesn&amp;#x27;t seems like it can wrangle what a request actually means.&lt;p&gt;It can tell me the time in Chicago, but not what computer would actually be the best for my work. That search will only be spam, irrelevant popular results and paid reviews.&lt;p&gt;Same if I asked for a _good_ pizza recipe, it would probably not understand what that actually means for me.&lt;p&gt;The whole model of &amp;quot;throwing a request in the box and expecting a result&amp;quot; seems broken to me, I mean even between humans it doesn&amp;#x27;t work that way, why would it work with an advanced AI ?&lt;p&gt;PS: even with more back and forth, I&amp;#x27;m imagining what we have now with customer support over chat, and while more efficient than by phone, it&amp;#x27;s definitely not the interface I want by default</text></comment>
<story><title>Despite faster broadband every year, web pages don&apos;t load any faster</title><url>https://www.datafantic.com/how-much-time-do-we-waste-waiting-for-websites-to-load/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>modeless</author><text>I believe we are almost at peak GUI. The endgame here is that all these crappy GUIs that are getting worse every year will be relegated to a role of being APIs for AI agents.&lt;p&gt;Instead of clicking around and filling out forms and waiting for loading spinners all the time, we&amp;#x27;ll just tell a large language model what we want to do in English, and it will go off and screen-scrape a bunch of apps and websites, do all the clicking for us, and summarize the results in a much simpler UI designed to actually be fast and useful, vs. designed to optimize the business metrics of some company as interpreted by a gaggle of product managers.&lt;p&gt;This isn&amp;#x27;t unprecedented. Plaid screen scrapes terrible bank websites and turns them into APIs, though without AI. Google Duplex uses AI to turn restaurant phone numbers into an API for making reservations. DeepMind&amp;#x27;s Sparrow[1], just announced today, answers factual questions posed in plain English by performing Google searches and summarizing the results. But it&amp;#x27;s going to be a revolution when it becomes much more general and able to take actions rather than just summarize information. It isn&amp;#x27;t far off! &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adept.ai&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;adept.ai&lt;/a&gt; is pretty much exactly what I&amp;#x27;m talking about, and I expect there are a lot more people working on similar things that are still in stealth mode.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.deepmind.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;building-safer-dialogue-agents&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.deepmind.com&amp;#x2F;blog&amp;#x2F;building-safer-dialogue-agents&lt;/a&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway0asd</author><text>I have a web app that is essentially a full OS GUI in the browser. The load time in Chrome with state restoration is almost exactly 0.3 seconds, which includes asynchronous gathering of file system artifacts and rendering display thereof.&lt;p&gt;At the same many primarily text sites struggle, such as news and social media, struggle to load in 15 seconds.&lt;p&gt;My connection measures about 920mbps down so 15 seconds is really ridiculously slow. This is certainly not a technology problem evidenced by my own app that is doing so much more is such shorter time.</text></comment>