Interface Eats the World
AI isn’t just remixing media — it’s swallowing interfaces, upending distribution, and discovery.
POD 153: Alex Was Right
AI’s consumer turn is here: Sora 2’s selfie-movies, Meta’s Vibes, and OpenAI’s Pulse point to shorter, agentic, video-first habits—and a shrinking role for text. Even The New York Times is saying newsletters are too wordy and need more video.
Out Friday AM. Listen.
PVA CONVERSATION
Brian: What about those who live beneath the commanding heights?
If people learned one thing from this newsletter and podcast, it’s that the interface sits upstream of everything in the information space. OpenAI is clearly going to battle it out to be the default interface across all core functions, from utility to entertainment.
The centrifugal pull will accelerate the commodification of those who supply these interfaces with the raw material they refine and enrich — and from which they extract the lion’s share of value created.
That would imply to me a few things:
Find some kind of human differentiation, whether that’s in personality, conversation, or community.
Be as lean as possible to stay adaptable.
Embrace the media singularity by using the tools now available.
Troy: Yes! Let’s connect the dots with a few examples from the last couple of weeks:
1. ChatGPT Pulse rips media interface away from everybody
Pulse is OpenAI’s personal news agent that automatically fetches stories from your chosen sources, summarizes them in your preferred style and density, and delivers a daily briefing tailored to you. It is the first practical example of AI’s mass agentic potential. Pulse will evolve as your dialog with ChatGPT evolves — its hyper-personalized loop becomes a powerful engagement engine and long term moat.
Consequence: Pulse will eat media interfaces for breakfast. It imperils paid media sources that lack either reporting strength or personality to sustain their value inside the AI blender. It will continue to undermine what’s left of the page-based digital ad business. By flattening all sources into one feed, Pulse commoditizes the subscription propositions that sit below it — why pay a premium for individual brands when Pulse can summarize them all for you?
2. Sora2 is a new kind of personal expression
OpenAI’s Sora2 video model generates hyper-realistic clips up to 20 seconds with synchronized audio, precise physics, and scene controls inside a dedicated social app, Sora. Users sign up with personal “Cameos” to make themselves and their friends the stars. Meta launched a similar product last week called Vibes, but without the same video sophistication or addictive draw of Cameos. Sora may not work as a new social network, but the AI video creation will manifest everywhere.
Consequence: AI-driven video creation opens a whole new category of self-expression. Youth will scoff, then embrace it. Cameos will be the new selfies. Creatives will eventually bend to the democratization power of low-cost video storytelling. Again, platform primacy is reinforced in a AI video ouroboros loop. Text is slowly downgraded to interface utility. We still use it but it is much harder to justify as ad-carrying medium.
3. Instant Checkout merges AI and the SKU
This week, ChatGPT Instant Checkout debuts with Shopify and Etsy. It lets you describe products in specific or vibey natural language and surfaces them in the AI chat window, along with native transactional functionality powered by Stripe.
Consequence: Checkout shows the power of smashing product databases together with AI. Discovery moves into your favorite AI chat interface. Retail brand and merchandising advantages fade. What happened to media is happening to retail. And with transactions handled natively inside the AI, publishers’ affiliate revenues — already squeezed by Google — get cut out of the loop entirely.
4. Instagram reaches 3 billion
Let’s not forget that other AI platform… Instagram. It hit 3 billion monthly global users — triple TikTok. Reels drives growth, fends off TikTok, and creates a vast pool of new ad inventory. In a small but meaningful change, Instagram also gave users more control over the algorithm this week. Meta is a masterful imitator.
Consequence: Instagram has proven that all content works inside its frame. News, B2B, lifestyle, entertainment. Only YouTube rivals its cultural gravity. Like cigarettes, it’s the platform we hate to love. Proprietary media platforms wither in its shadow. Marketers follow the data and reach, which means more brand budgets flow into Reels and away from publishers, TV, and niche platforms.
5. Apple’s “Find My” offers some respite
And as a counterpoint, Gen Z has quietly repurposed Apple’s Find My into a social app. Instead of feeds and filters, it’s just presence: who’s where, who’s together, who’s not. No posts, no ads, no noise.
Consequence: Find My is social stripped to its core. Despite, or because of, the vast might of Insta, young users will fight algorithmic networks in favor of simpler, ambient forms of connection. Scarcity becomes the flex. Platforms can’t monetize this kind of intimacy easily, which makes it a cultural counterweight to Instagram’s ad-churn.
6. NYT The World evolves to meet changing preferences
The New York Times debuts The World, a new global newsletter replacing The Morning Briefing in Europe and Asia. Katrin Bennhold isn’t the “editor” but the “host.” She says she wants the product to be “smart, short and delightful.” It will be personal, video-heavy, lifestyle-forward — food, entertainment, fashion, travel — with a daily quiz.
Consequence: The World is a recognition that dense news needs to be lightened. It’s personality and play layered over information. A smart move for the Times, but still bottlenecked by the functional limits of email.
7. Cloudflare plays white knight
Cloudflare introduces its Content Signals protocol, allowing publishers to mark whether content can be crawled, summarized, or used to train AI. The CDN — once invisible plumbing — suddenly becomes the frontline of defense for media.
Consequence: Cloudflare is filling a vacuum. Governments are slow, platforms are conflicted, publishers lack technical muscle. Into that gap, Cloudflare steps in as a “neutral” middleman. If respected, its standard could enforce licensing. If ignored, it simply replaces one gatekeeper with another. Either way, Cloudflare positions itself to capture a slice of whatever anemic value flows from AI content licensing.
8. People Inc embraces food creators
People Inc, the largest food publisher in the U.S., acquires Feedfeed, a creator network of 1,000 food influencers. It’s the company’s first acquisition since IAC merged Dotdash and Meredith in 2021.
Consequence: Feedfeed adds a creator-driven, social-first layer to People Inc. It’s a shift from owned-and-operated SEO models toward distributed, creator-led reach. The economics are messy — creators capture more value — but legacy publishers have no choice if they want relevance in social-first distribution.
And so…
Social and AI disrupted text. Video is following quickly. Retail will be pulled through the same interface shift. Capital is chasing AI at a scale that defies logic — until we see how much the interface layer pulls out of everything beneath it.
Alex: Interface rules
Before we get started: if you can’t get enough of me let me plug my other newsletter where I talk about gaming and also media, culture, and AI.
So, OpenAI is winning on sheer velocity right now: Pulse, Sora, and ChatGPT commerce hooks show how fast AI is collapsing media, social, and shopping into one conversational layer. It’s so obvious when you think about it. Layers of abstraction between us and computers keep getting removed: we went from punchcards to tapping buttons on touchscreens to just having a conversation.
Much of our interaction with computers will soon become a relationship with an AI that knows everything about you and the world around you. OpenAI is betting on that and has just ignited battles across multiple interface fronts.
OpenAI going for media interfaces: Pulse reframes news as utility, not infinite scroll hopping to engage you with something. It’s highly personalized in both source and output.
OpenAI going for productivity interfaces: Pulse again, once connected with your calendar and e-mail can do many of the tasks you’d do there. This is the assistant future Google promised but has yet to deliver on (although, at this rate, it’s imminent).
OpenAI going for social interfaces:: Sora’s “cameos” make AI movies the new selfie; Meta will mimic, but OpenAI set the tone. And maybe people are excited to move to a non-Meta platform but with 3 billion Instagram users it’s maybe one of the tougher fights.
OpenAI going for Commerce interfaces: Chat + Etsy/Shopify turns filters and funnels into a simple conversation: “Find this, buy it”. Shopping with ChatGPT is revelatory. My Amazon searches (third-largest search engine) have dropped by 95% and have been completely replaced with ChatGPT. This is great for Shopify whose bet on the open web could benefit them greatly.
Bottom line: They won’t stop until they have a bet in every type of interface. First, finding a way to replace the core behavior, removing friction, making things easier — then, stacking new capabilities on top. It’s replacing old behaviors with new ones and I expect adoption will be incredibly quick because of how natural it feels. There’s next to no learning curve.
It doesn’t mean OpenAI will win long term. OpenAI has the momentum, but the interface war isn’t over and the platform owners still hold cards. Meta is astonishingly good at copying what works, and both Google and Apple have unmatched scale — but most importantly — they own the path to the interface. They’re not giving that up. If I were Apple, I’d just sign the world’s biggest check and see what happens.
Are we sure long newsletters are dead? Did we just talk about interface singularity that is wholly dependent on curating a firehose of relevant, trustworthy subscriptions to be synthesized by the likes of Pulse? Yeah, in the future, bullet point newsletters will be useless, but 5000-word drops will feed the data set of our daily consumption. Curation? Yes. Quality? Yes. But volume? Hell yeah. Didn't we just learn this from the LLM feeding frenzy? More is better if it's relevant and trustworthy. Don't worry Brian, I want 5000 words from you, if it's not slop. And I'll let Pulse write my bullet points. Please and thank you.
Don't believe the hype, guys. Altman is a con man, Open AI has no real business plan. The insane level of investment isn't going to deliver returns. Open AI is going down soon, Microsoft will slurp up the crumbs. LLMs will remain has a humdrum feature in Windows. Big fucking deal. And slop backlash is coming.