In "The Diamond Age", a 1995 novel by Neil Stephenson, there is an interactive educational device called "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer". In a nutshell, it is like an e-ink device which constantly authors its own contents in order to educate and parent one of the young characters in the book.

Reading about the Primer 15 years ago captivated me, and at the time I didn't expect this to be a real thing in the near future.

I saw a demo for "Flipbook", a website which isn't really a website, in the sense that it isn't HTML and JavaScript written by someone. Rather, the pixels are continuously hallucinated by a neural network.

![[ParisExampleVideo.mp4]]

This thing is pretty mind blowing! The first use case they're applying this to are explainers, but I think this is a glimpse into the future of how websites will look like.

In a similar vein, people are exploring other neurally rendered software

Neurally rendered video games

There are a few examples of people building "world models" for video games. The best one I've seen to date is Google Deepmind's Genie3.

The thing that's wild about this is that the player can co-create the game with the neural network. I can see this totally revolutionizing games with branching narratives that are driven by players' choices.

Neurally rendered operating systems

Some people are even extending this to entire operating systems! You can open "applications" like MS Paint, and actually paint things. Again, not a real operating system-- it's hallucianted frame by frame by a neural network: