How AI Became Something We Talk To

Mon, 09 Nov 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I read a comment on LinkedIn suggesting that the LLM applications we use today would be better described as natural language interfaces. The writer connected them to something we used to dream about in the 1980s: being able to explain what you wanted to a computer and have it work with you.

I think he’s right. We wanted to sit down and ask the computer for something without first learning the command, the query language, or whatever name someone had given the feature. We wanted to explain, clarify, and keep going. Now we can do a remarkable amount of that, and calling it a natural language interface somehow sounds like we are underselling it.

Calling all of it AI has made it harder to explain what we have, because the same name covers the field of research, the models we run, and the thinking machines we grew up watching in fiction. Calling it a natural language interface recognizes the achievement rather than shrinking it: we can explain what we want in our own language and work with the computer from there, without borrowing the rest of the fictional machine.

To see where the language model fits, it helps to back up. The field spent decades trying to get computers to do things we associate with intelligence before conversation became the way most people encountered it.

Language Models on Andrew Hunter — Systems Architect & Builder

How AI Became Something We Talk To