ai-native messaging isn’t messaging

since openai is building a phone, let’s think a little bit about one of the core aspects of a phone which is the messaging experience.

the current imessage moat narrative is kinda lazy actually in many ways. lemme explain. it gets repeated cuz it was true for ~a decade+ & ppl confused durability with permanence. but the conditions that made it sticky are maybe just maybe eroding, slowly. again i think due to ai.

you see blue bubbles are a status signifier that got coded into dating dynamics in the us, esp millennials. that’s culturally contingent & also culturally reversible esp since the ios messages inbox itself is sorta broken & nobody’s really fixed it. today messages is a graveyard of

• 2fa codes
• doordash updates
• spam political texts
• “your prescription is ready”
• actual humans you love
• group chats you can’t leave
• businesses pretending to be ppl

the fact that all of these get equal visual weight is crazy when you actually think about it. it’s a paradigm inherited from sms. nobody redesigned it because nobody had to or it became too hard.

ai native messaging probably looks less like messaging. if an agent knows your context, the “message” stops being the atomic unit. the atomic unit becomes something like intent or thread of attention. some examples of what might shift:

• inbound triage happens before you see it. 2fa codes get auto resolved if you’re actively logging in without any ux!, otherwise surfaced. delivery updates collapse into a single ambient “your food is 8 min away” object. spam maybe just dies.

• outbound becomes lossy compressed intent. you say “tell sarah i’m running late” & the agent picks the right channel, right tone, & right level of contrition based on history.

• the feed is rebuilt around people & relationships. one sarah surface that unifies imessage, whatsapp, ig dms, signal, email threads w/ her. the carrier/protocol becomes invisible plumbing, the way smtp is now.

• group dynamics get weird & interesting. agent mediated catchup (“here’s what you missed in the gc”), i mean you could even have an agent vibe checking before you send the cooked text at 2am.

the wedge for an ai first messenger is something more like a surface that already understands your full life context, where messaging is one expression of that context, & switching to it feels like upgrading from inbox to assistant not downgrading to a new app.

& now that network effects can happen quickly, a new type of messaging experience could be unlocked with a new device or even without a device that overcomes the pure social elements of the imessage moat.