Simon Willison’s Weblog

Help wanted: AI designers (via) Nick Hobbs:

LLMs feel like genuine magic. Yet, somehow we haven’t been able to use this amazing new wand to churn out amazing new products. This is puzzling.

Why is it proving so difficult to build mass-market appeal products on top of this weird and powerful new substrate?

Nick thinks we need a new discipline - an AI designer (which feels to me like the design counterpart to an AI engineer). Here's Nick's list of skills they need to develop:

• Just like designers have to know their users, this new person needs to know the new alien they’re partnering with. That means they need to be just as obsessed about hanging out with models as they are with talking to users.
• The only way to really understand how we want the model to behave in our application is to build a bunch of prototypes that demonstrate different model behaviors. This — and a need to have good intuition for the possible — means this person needs enough technical fluency to look kind of like an engineer.
• Each of the behaviors you’re trying to design have near limitless possibility that you have to wrangle into a single, shippable product, and there’s little to no prior art to draft off of. That means this person needs experience facing the kind of “blank page” existential ambiguity that founders encounter.