AI prompts are now code

We will need new way to deal with

I’ve spent the last month swimming in GPT-inspired generative AI demos, hacking, and personal use. I’m almost all the way convinced this tech revolution could be as big as mobile or the move to public compute and storage clouds i.e. massive.

It's changing how I think about venture opportunities, how I advise startups, and generally how I think the next decade in software businesses will go. I’ve written about this before¹ when I was on the cautious side of my curve of exploration - the UX is primitive and rough. Text is not a real user interface. Yada yada. 

The User Interface for generative AI matters

These things are still true but miss the point. A generalized AI that can understand humans and can be used as code in applications is a sea change in application development.

A point I want to make is embedded in a statement above - AI prompts are code. Someone even quickly extracted the AI prompt that is essentially the code behind the Bing AI chat user experience. 

Kevin Liu @kliu128

The entire prompt of Microsoft Bing Chat?! (Hi, Sydney.)

In fact, it was embarrassingly easy, meaning that anyone could replicate Bing’s experience with search. Their only moat being their brand and an actual search engine, but little else. Well, turns out those two things are nothing to sniff at, but still, this is not how the industry we know and love does business. We hide, we obfuscate at the altar of ‘trade secrets’. This was a shocking revelation. And frankly an anti-competitive one from the POV of Google and other search engines that have some semblance of brand and IP in this area.

Since AI prompts are code used to construct applications, they will need to be treated as code to fit into the developer toolchain. This means they need to be able to be versioned and source-controlled to start. But beyond that, they may need a specific set of syntax rules. Even a specific file extension. This will allow advanced workflows like diffing, merging, comparisons, and other whatnot. File compression and obfuscation will not be far behind.

How long till the first AI prompt file format is proposed? I wouldn’t be surprised if one already existed (just can’t find it). And if anyone is willing to collaborate on one, ping me and let's do it! In the meantime stay tuned for more future-focused ideas from all the spelunking I and team are doing on generative AI. Kingdoms will fall² from this sea change; bet on it.

Ta.

1. https://austinhenley.com/blog/naturallanguageui.html

2. 80% of Google’s revenue comes from search that is processed through an ad business model. If their search volume is threatened, the profits from their business model may collapse even faster. Problematic for a public company.