It's Time To Build AI | UX (original) (raw)

In early April, a conversation between swyx and Maggie (and later Geoffrey and Linus) snowballed into a SF meetup centered around our joint interests as UX people crossing over into AI. The original plan was for 15-30 people, then Ivan Zhao graciously offered Notion HQ1 to host 80 people, and interest bloomed into almost 400 signups with unfortunately more people on waitlist than we could accommodate. We put out a Call For Demos, 68 people submitted, and 16 presented live.

But this isn’t just a meetup recap blogpost.

It is a call to arms.

We are no stranger to manifesting meetups, but even by SF standards the event was a smashing success, with many great UX people all in one room. We aren’t surprised; we think the potential in and demand for novel AI UX interaction is enormous:

We think what Nat Friedman calls the AI capabilities overhang is in part due to people not exploring the “latent space” of AI UX (including Generative UIs, many of which were explored in the demos featured below).

As Linus said in his opening comments:

“I spent a lot of time exploring different kind of interfaces for highlighting and structuring and helping people navigate text and one of my key takeaways from that year was that we have to go beyond just staring at walls of text and prompting.”

We fundamentally believe that the ultimate potential for LLMs is not merely to build “ChatGPT for your docs” (though that is great and needed too!). To do that, we must break out of the textbox, but also create spaces to share new UX paradigms and concepts with each other, both online and IRL, in a lightweight fashion that encourages collaboration, inspiration, and friendly competition rather than fundraising.

If you too, believe that there is a better world waiting for us on the other side of the border box, ping us to help.

xoxo,

Your fellow AI | UX enjoyers

PS: If you are in 🗽 NYC - the first AI | UX will be hosted by Paul Butler on May 17 - register/share it here!

To start events in your city, come coordinate on our Discord.

Timestamps and individual submitted demos