Going to start collecting different AI design metaphors. Drew Breunig described Gods, Interns, and Cogs. Geoffrey Litt is thinking about Copilots and HUDs.
Would love to see more documentation, like this March 2025 post from Google, educating content creators on how to live in the AI search future.
I love a good nerdy usability blog post (thx Baymard)
tl;dr: Dropdowns kinda suck except in very limited and specific circumstances.
Reuters made a little game about Cozy Games (via NiemanLab)
Related, I don’t think I would have survived 2020 nearly as well without the Untitled Goose Game
Learning about DeepSeek today …
- This great FAQ from Ben Thompson digs into why this is big deal, why it might be good in the long run, and also provides a nice background on different reinforcement learning approaches.
- You’d be right to think DeepSeek, an AI model from a Chinese company, doesn’t want to talk about some things.
- DeepSeek was surprisingly cheap to train and is very cheap to use (compared to similar models from OpenAI and Anthropic).
After plenty of discussions and tons of exploration, I think we can simplify the world of AI use cases into three simple, distinct buckets:
- Gods: Super-intelligent, artificial entities that do things autonomously.
- Interns: Supervised copilots that collaborate with experts, focusing on grunt work.
- Cogs: Functions optimized to perform a single task extremely well, usually as part of a pipeline or interface.