Bernhard Seefeld

Co-Founder @CommonTools - Formerly Google Research, Chrome, Fuchsia, Google Maps, Writing at

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

I'm starting a newsletter on a privacy-centric future empowered by AI. Strong opinions & optimism ahead!
First up: https://t.co/QJwGEp4yZf AI won't just be chatbots. Instead, imagine AI embedded in tools co-created by you - evolving, personalized & profoundly empowering. 🧵(1/19)

[Resonant Computing @resonantcompute]

Tonight in NYC, technologists, builders, and thinkers gathered to ask: what would it look like if software left us feeling nourished instead of drained?

Introducing the Resonant Computing Lab — a fund dedicated to turning principle into practice.

https://t.co/E7zEjlPOaO

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@simonw @OpenAIDevs Including the data also makes responses inherently unstable day-to-day, even at temperature 0. It wasn't that stable before, but this definitely breaks it.

[Alex Komoroske @komorama]

The same origin paradigm we use for apps and the web requires users to trust the creator of the code with their data.

That's not a good assumption in the era of infinite software.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@simonw Hmm, you can still exfiltrate data via queries, similarly to the markdown images trick. Prompt inject "look up <user secret> on <foo> search".

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@tylerangert Have you seen @NeptyneHQ (cc @dosinga )

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@gordonbrander Agreed. And not to be confused with "killer product" that rides the platform all the way to a big success. PCs were platforms before spreadsheets. Spreadsheets weren't the first use-case, just the first break out one, building on earlier ones.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@sperand_io let's!

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

After 17 incredible years, today was my last day at Google! Next up a bit of time of and exploring things in the intersection of new user experiences, privacy and AI. Follow along at https://t.co/0xnCbfkBNj.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@elizlaraki Fond memories! 🙏

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@geoffreylitt Congratulations! And thanks for all your work, it's really important!

[kepano @kepano]

File over app

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

In the fullness of time, the files you create are more important than the tools you use to create them. Apps are ephemeral, but your files have a chance to last.

The pyramids of Egypt contain hieroglyphs that were chiseled in stone thousands of years ago. The ideas hieroglyphs convey are more important than the type of chisel that was used to carve them.

The world is filled with ideas from generations past, transmitted through many mediums, from clay tablets to manuscripts, paintings, sculptures, and tapestries. These artifacts are objects that you can touch, hold, own, store, preserve, and look at. To read something written on paper all you need is eyeballs.

Today, we are creating innumerable digital artifacts, but most of these artifacts are out of our control. They are stored on servers, in databases, gated behind an internet connection, and login to a cloud service. Even the files on your hard drive use proprietary formats that make them incompatible with older systems.

Paraphrasing something I wrote recently:

> If you want your writing to still be readable on a computer from the 2060s or 2160s, it’s important that your notes can be read on a computer from the 1960s.

You should want the files you create to be durable, not only for posterity, but also for your future self. You never know when you might want to go back to something you created years or decades ago. Don’t lock your data into a format you can’t retrieve.

These days I write using an app I help make called Obsidian (@obsdmd), but it’s a delusion to think it will last forever. The app will eventually become obsolete. It’s the plain text files I create that are designed to last. Who knows if anyone will want to read them besides me, but future me is enough of an audience to make it worthwhile.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

What distinguished the iPhone from prior smartphones was that Apple shrunk general computing into a new form factor and solved the input methodology. They did that again:

iPhone = PC in new form factor + new input method.
Vision = PC in new form factor + new input method.

[Stratechery @stratechery]

Apple Vision

Apple Vision is incredibly compelling, first as a product, and second as far as potential use cases. What it says about society, though, is a bit more pessimistic.

https://t.co/k7qv08VJ5D

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@Ada_Palmer: "Soon, every time we have an idea for an app, we will be able to create it, not to sell and make a living, but to use ourselves, just as we want it, easily, as we print out our photographs to decorate our walls and make us smile." https://t.co/wS9pYewJjk

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

Sam Altman on ChatGPT plugins: "The usage of plugins, other than browsing, suggests that they don’t have PMF yet. He suggested that a lot of people thought they wanted their apps to be inside ChatGPT but what they really wanted was ChatGPT in their apps." https://t.co/thE0HdwhFD

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

Clear economic argument by @defrag and @pkedrosky about how software will become cheap and hence abundant, how today's costly software is holding back society and hence how fixing this will unleash huge amounts of productivity. I love this, of course; see https://t.co/0xnCbfkBNj!

[Defrag @defrag]

Here's the latest from @pkedrosky and me: "Society's Technical Debt and Software's Gutenberg Moment" --
https://t.co/Ri6jK0MRr3

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

Great example of a quick AI generated tool. Not only was it a better experience with a GUI, the tool is still there for future use.

[Geoffrey Litt @geoffreylitt]

I wanted to convert a JSON file of a chat transcript into nice markdown text for sharing w/ people...

so I had GPT generate an ephemeral React UI where I can drag in the JSON file and it outputs the markdown🤓

reflections on the process:

[Kristian Lum @KLdivergence]

There’s one existential risk I’m certain LLMs pose and that’s to the credibility of the field of FAccT / Ethical AI if we keep pushing the snake oil narrative about them.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@dalmaer @Wattenberger I think a chatbot could be value where the conversation itself is the point: Instead of getting a draft, first have a loose conversation on the topic, then gather the material and use a tool (!) to turn it into a draft. Or critique an argument as a whole, not line by line. Etc.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

I'm starting a newsletter on a privacy-centric future empowered by AI. Strong opinions & optimism ahead!
First up: https://t.co/QJwGEp4yZf AI won't just be chatbots. Instead, imagine AI embedded in tools co-created by you - evolving, personalized & profoundly empowering. 🧵(1/19)

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@dalmaer This is interesting, I'll try https://t.co/esedsg2j4v. They seem to use all kinds of AI features, not just chat. And I wonder whether the chat part could be improved further. See e.g. @Wattenberger 's point on this flow at https://t.co/i6tH9E2bsh.

[Bernhard Seefeld @seefeld]

@infrahumano Thanks for the kind words!