Within tech, it’s very well known that periodically we have these things that are like spikes or bubbles where there’s lots of hype and mania and then it all falls off. I think we’ve just witnessed it with cryptocurrency (however if we can find a magical aha moment for the blockchain, we might see a resurgence). The other phenomena we see are massive tidal wave changes in tech. The internet, mobile phones, personal computers - all massive tidal changes in tech, bubbles that actually turned out to be correct and lasted.

Why is this important to think about? I’m excited about social consumer products, and as we can see with previous winners in social consumer, they ride on the early stages of tidal waves. Timing is super important with these products as they survive on their network effect for defensibility. But as I talk about in a previous post, you first need a utility to bring the first chicken - and as Andrew Chen talks about, the barrier to entry at the beginning of an S curve is much lower than at the end.

What’s exciting for me now though, is that we are witnessing two tidal wave changes at the same time. What happens when the tech industry is adopting two massively game-changing technologies at once?

The first is what I’ve seen in my last 6 months completely take over my newsletters and X timeline, as well as in the last cohort of EF - generative AI and LLMs. LLM’s are well and truly going to take over how we use applications, but OMG I hate chat interfaces. One of the biggest things we try to eliminate as UX designers is cognitive load, and trying to get users to ask a question with no prompts or inspiration adds huge amount of cognitive load and even worse, most likely takes away from the magic you’re trying to show to get users hooked on your product that you’ve spent months building. The true LLM revolution will come when the industry begins to treat generative AI like bottled water - Necessary. Ubiquitous. And the same. freaking. thing. inside every bottle. Obviously, different models have different strengths and capabilities, but in the eyes of a user, they expect a correct result, a good refreshing water, without caring where it came from or how it was made. 2023 was the year that companies created their springs (foundation models). 2024 is the year we package and market and distribute.

This opinion of user experiences leads me into what I think is the second tidal wave we’re watching at the moment, and I was sceptical at first, but I think Vision Pro will drive spatial computing from a gimmicky way to explore the world while giving you motion sickness to a whole new dimension of how we interact. Casey Neistat was the one who convinced me - the scene of him working in Times Square while people worked around him felt ✨magical✨. This paired with the opinion I’ve heard several times that after a while, your brain just gets used to having digital screens everywhere I can see myself, and others, having spatial computing as a default way of interacting. In 2024, the question is how do we make spatial computing better and by that I mean easier and cheaper (let’s be honest, that’s all we care about as consumers anyway) than a mobile phone or personal computer. The first hurdle will be form factor, but we’ve seen Apple execute this before with the mac, iPhone, etc... The second will be speed of information, and that’s where generative AI will come into its own. Add the magic that you integrate the compute experience into your world, and that unlocks new kinds of applications that just aren't possible when you're looking at a screen like I am now.

So that's why I think it's going to be a really exciting decade in tech.