NLUI is the successor to GUI

Wed Aug 06 2025 (Edited: Wed Oct 08 2025)

As the story goes, in 1979, Steve Jobs visited Xerox PARC and was highly impressed by their graphical user interface (GUI) and mouse technology, and those ideas heavily influenced Apple’s direction. Since then, GUI has dominated the interfaces when it comes to non-programmers.

With the rise of LLMs, we might see the decline of GUI. It will not disappear, but it will slowly start to be replaced by NLUIs (Natural Language User Interfaces). Today they can feel gimmicky; that will change quickly,

I can absolutely imagine my grandma telling (or typing into) her phone “Reduce brightness” or “Change the picture on my background” instead of asking me to do it. We used to set Settings Command Line, then through (often complicated and deeply nested) GUIs. Soon they will be set by writing and/or speaking a plain language.

Many other “complex” GUIs will follow.