OUI-1: world's first model for Generative UI

zzahlekhan about 3 hours ago 56 commentsRead Article on openui.com

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Discussion (56 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

piterrro•7 minutes ago

I think there is a big misunderstanding in the space around what Gen UI is and what its used for. Lots of folks refer to it as a framework for building web apps - its not. Gen UI is a DSL for LLM to build UIs on the fly in a multi turn converstation - those are - throw away, one off interfaces or visualization. The reason for the DSL is pragmatism - standardisation and token savings.

The html/css/js or a react app built by an LLM is not Gen UI.

znnajdla•about 2 hours ago

The most interesting part about this for me is that they decided to create their own language or DSL for the task at hand. So it's not just a large language model; it's an LLM with its own language.

I have a feeling that the best AI systems to come will, in fact, be a complete package like this: a harness, a DSL, and an entire package designed to produce certain outcomes cheaper and faster.

And producing that complete package is why software engineering will not be obsolete.

WithinReason•about 1 hour ago

I agree. I'm waiting for someone to invent a programming language designed for LLMs where for a given partial program p and candidate token t it's possible to tell whether p+t can be the prefix of a correct program or not so that t can be excluded from the LLM's probability distribution at generation time, so the LLM can only generate correct programs. Or something like that.

cpill•about 1 hour ago

doesn't this imply it would solve the halting problem?

WithinReason•about 1 hour ago

No, practical programs don't need full Turing completeness. Most programs you want to write you intend to either halt or run indefinitely, because you want to avoid crashes.

raincole•about 2 hours ago

Do you hate the designer changed the UI of your favorite app so you have to relearn it every three months?

Congrats! Now you need to relearn it every time you open the app.

kemiller•about 1 hour ago

Another way to think of this is you just ship the UI DSL, and the user can get the app to customize it themselves with built-in guardrails. Everything should be LCARS at this point.

znnajdla•about 1 hour ago

I can think of one use case for this: Dashboards to answer one-off questions. Think PowerBI, Tableau, etc.

zahlekhan•about 1 hour ago

yes, conversational analytics is what most of users use OpenUI for.

orbital-decay•about 2 hours ago

Nothing stops you from caching known states and workflows, or simply making the "fast" part of your interface fixed. I think this could be genuinely useful for one-off cases for which no interface exists, or simply for interface prototyping and design.

zahlekhan•about 2 hours ago

The goal of generative UI should be to make software more personal while preserving the workflows people already know. Two users might have very different interfaces, but each should have a consistent experience over time.

Den_VR•about 1 hour ago

I can only imagine the troubleshooting and customer support experience. Yet another problem created by “ai” that’s probably only solvable with more “ai”

zahlekhan•about 1 hour ago

I understand the skepticism. We hear this often and are working on it. As AI agents become more common in SaaS, these experiences will become more reliable and ready for everyday use.

troupo•about 1 hour ago

> The goal of generative UI should be to make software more personal while preserving the workflows people already know.

These are inherently contradictory statements.

When people actually did research instead of vibe-coding, they learned it the hard way.

cpill•about 1 hour ago

Chat Ui killed the GUI star. language is The ultimate UI. I guess you still need graphs (mainly so you can have dramatic moments in movies), but that's it

zahlekhan•43 minutes ago

love that song! Not every interaction would be conversational, that's why we spent more than 50 years building GUI

IncreasePosts•about 2 hours ago

That's why I have my own model restyle the delivered UI to my preferred UI.

PhunkyPhil•about 1 hour ago

You missed the point, it's not for you to write.

alentred•about 1 hour ago

Remember when everything was iSomething? The original iPod and iPhone created the real trend back then.

Seems like many AI products ride the same wave now. Open WebUI, OpenHands, OpenUI. I am a bit more dubious about this affiliation, though.

joshmarlow•about 1 hour ago

I've been thinking for a while that something like this could be a solution for the suboptimal UX in the digital assets space.

Imagine a very small LLM embedded into a MetaMask equivalent where you just specify the task you want to do - ie, "I want to send USDT on mainnet", "I want to import the token at address 0x..." - and the wallet assembles the UX for this task for the human to execute.

zahlekhan•about 1 hour ago

yep, this is usecases we are trying to solve. Current model fits in consumer hardware. Hopefully we can fit this into a phone soon.

nezhar•about 2 hours ago

OpenAI, OpenAPI and now OpenUI. Explain this to a non tech person...

cianmm•about 2 hours ago

I actually thought this was OpenAI until I read your comment

arrowleaf•about 1 hour ago

My browser popped up a modal saying 'Did you mean openai.com? Attackers sometimes mimic sites by making hard-to-see changes to the web address'.

mmastrac•about 2 hours ago

It should be possible to run on Mac via https://github.com/mmastrac/diffgemma, but I'm at rustconf right now and I can't download weights on hotel wifi easily.

zahlekhan•about 2 hours ago

let me try this out as well

mmastrac•about 2 hours ago

https://github.com/mmastrac/diffgemma#custom-quantization has some instructions on (naively) quantizing the upstream model as well.

tomashertus•about 2 hours ago

Quite interesting to see no real comments here for 50+ minutes, so I will kick it off.

I'm a huge believer in this future of software. Having the UI layer completely abstracted from pre-written code and dynamically generated "on the fly" based on the context of the user is, I believe, the future.

Just think about the complexity of localization and how many IFs you had to write to solve different language versions, etc. in the old PHP code. A lot of that complexity can simply disappear.

Having dynamically built UI won't only be better for the user experience, it can actually allow us to create much more personalized experiences (I hate when UI teams constantly redesign perfectly fine software).

Interestingly, this will open up a completely new consumption interface, because I believe there will be a UI predefined by the creator of the application (your day 1 user experience) that will then evolve into a more personalized experience over time.

So much room to grow in this space.

amazing_stories•about 1 hour ago

I agree somewhat. An example might be a .md file describing a UI for commonly used tool that is invoked whenever you reference it. This could be a stripped down version of a complex UI for some software that has a lot of different uses (like 3D modeling programs and image editors) allowing the user to focus on the subset of work they do with it.

zahlekhan•about 2 hours ago

this exactly the future we are working towards as well. You should checkout AppLess http://github.com/thesysdev/appless

PhunkyPhil•about 1 hour ago

Great link, I haven't seen that before. I saw someone at Microsoft make an "OS" that was just copilot chats per-window, generating the HTML. I recreated it and it's not great, but it's a fun toy that _feels_ transformative, unlike almost every AI product ever made besides the fundamental chat interface.

To take this a step further: https://chatjimmy.ai/

Imagine AppLess running a model as good as qwen at 20,000 tok/sec. It would be generated in a shorter amount of time as downloading a webpage right now. If this works out the consequences are kind of scary. The end of SaaS, the end of software being the moat or the property of companies, the embolstering of data protection (since that's fundamentally what code operates)...

zahlekhan•42 minutes ago

Exciting times indeed

Boxxed•about 2 hours ago

> Just think about the complexity of localization and how many IFs you had to write to solve different language versions, etc. in the old PHP code. A lot of that complexity can simply disappear.

IFs! Oh no! Throwing all of this into a non-deterministic and expensive black box is making it less complex, you say?

c-hendricks•about 1 hour ago

How do you reconcile ...

> I hate when UI teams constantly redesign perfectly fine software

... with ...

> Having the UI layer completely abstracted from pre-written code and dynamically generated "on the fly" based on the context of the user is, I believe, the future

In this scenario there's still no guarantee that the UI won't randomly change. There's no guarantee that the ui generated for the user will be the same visit to visit.

tracyhenry•about 1 hour ago

Generative UI is unsolved because current models do not have taste and end up generating the same kind of slop.

I'm amazed that this blog doesn't even have a single screenshot/photo of the kind of UI they can generate.

Focusing on benchmarks in this domain feels very wrong.

thomasfromcdnjs•about 1 hour ago

Gen UI is meant to be design agnostic, the output is just the content and the form. It is on the implementation, agentic or human to make it look good.

tracyhenry•about 1 hour ago

design is the hard problem. i don't know what hard problem this is trying to solve here

spiderfarmer•about 1 hour ago

There's an image in the article and a full website with more media is just 1 click away. Instead you resorted to typing 272 characters not including ENTER, and I doubt that was easier than clicking the logo to visit the homepage.

Typing this comment also did not solve your problem, because that would require the author to read your comment, add more screenshots and it would require that you revisit it.

tracyhenry•about 1 hour ago

When the blog title is "world's first model for Generative UI", you are supposed to show something that GPT/Claude couldn't do. Instead it's all benchmark.

I don't know what media you are talking about. It's all slop worse than current slop.

mysterydip•about 2 hours ago

> Interfaces must be generated in under a second

Why? Is two seconds too long? Would your other constraints be easier (usability and hardware spec) if this was longer? Does anyone actually need a UI generated in under a second?

TaupeRanger•about 2 hours ago

The term "Generative UI" refers to a front-end design approach where an AI model dynamically builds a UI in real time instead of relying on static, hard-coded templates.

mcmcmc•about 1 hour ago

This just seems incredibly wasteful. What value does that add?

zahlekhan•41 minutes ago

Similar to how AI assitants give you answer directly instead of making you search through walls of text. Generative UI builds the right interface based on the context and intent of the user.

jnwatson•about 1 hour ago

It keeps the users on their toes.

zahlekhan•about 2 hours ago

In Generative UI, the interface needs to built in realtime based on context and intent of the user. Hence the constraints. Ideally we are targeting sub 500ms to compete with current software.

PhunkyPhil•about 1 hour ago

I get annoyed if a webpage takes longer than 1-2 seconds to generate right now. You don't?

hatefulheart•about 1 hour ago

Someone steel man the case for users actually wanting to be a UI designer for the application they pay you for.

JohnBooty•about 1 hour ago

GenUI isn't about designing cosmetic "skins." (Usually, anyway. I guess it could be used for that)

It's generally for letting users customize the own workflows. How many times have you, or one of your users, liked a piece of software because it mostly fits an existing workflow but that remaining 20% is an annoyance, or maybe even a dealbreaker?

This is probably more common for businesses. They have existing procedures. and they want your software to fit into their existing processes and workflows... not the other way around.

GenUI is far from a one size fits all approach or magic bullet, but it can address a lot of those situations that either would have been dealbreakers, annoyances, or change requests. I suppose it can also help with user retention; once they've put the time and effort into customizing your product they theoretically are less likely to switch to a competitor.

Existing OpenAI/Anthropic models seem to already handle this pretty well. As you might expect, letting users describe their own UI is pretty easy. The hard part is making it work and making sure they don't escape their sandbox...

zahlekhan•about 1 hour ago

agreed. the core idea behind Generative UI is personalisation

bee_rider•about 1 hour ago

As a user, most GUIs are awful. I’m fairly certain that this thing could, for example, vibe up a better UI for Amazon Music in less time than it takes me to find the music I’ve purchased and downloaded (because the system is more interested in funneling me toward a streaming subscription that I don’t have).

Of course pushing users toward subscription services they don’t need is part of the design goal. So I guess something where the user vibecodes up their own UI will not become standard. But we can dream.

hmokiguess•about 2 hours ago

Oui ma chérie

ramesh31•about 2 hours ago

Please for the love of god have a human write something that you expect other humans to read

polotics•about 2 hours ago

"The gap became the north star" is written large enough though: I could read it with my own Aieyes!

It's also the only sentence I read on that page before closing it, of course.

ahknight•about 2 hours ago

Oh no.

0gs•about 2 hours ago

oh, you eye?

zahlekhan•about 2 hours ago

i prefer wee