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For long-form interviews, news, and commentary about the WordPress ecosystem. This is the companion show to The WP Minute, your favorite 5-minutes of WordPress news every week.
Eric Karkovack (00:01)
Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the WP Minute. I'm your host, Eric Karkovac. Today, I'm joined by Jason Adams. Jason represents the recently minted WordPress AI team. We're going to talk about the team's mission and its potential impact on the WordPress project. Jason, welcome to the WP Minute.
Jason Adams (00:23)
Hi Eric, thanks so much.
Eric Karkovack (00:25)
And so I'm really excited for this talk. As I said to you off the air, ⁓ I think we could talk for hours and hours because there's so much going on with AI and how we might ⁓ implement it with WordPress. But I wanted to start by just asking a little bit about yourself. I know you work for Automatic. What's your role there? And what do you do day to day for the company?
Jason Adams (00:50)
I joined 13 weeks ago, I think now, beginning of October. ⁓
Basically, Automatic has a tremendous amount of AI related initiatives going on. They are all in on it. And James LaPage is the head of all of the AI teams that are running and doing their things there. A couple examples of the projects would be like Big Sky. So if you make a WordPress.com site, you'll...
you'll actually see two AI things. You'll see the site spec, which is what you fill out to describe what kind of site you want. And then it creates the site. And then you're dropped into the editor as we think of it, the block editor, and you have a sidebar and that's what we refer to as Big Sky. You also have Telex at telex.automatic.ai, which is for block building. So these are like all different things that we have going on. So James Lepage is the head of all of that. He and I met while I was
working on the core AI stuff, I started contributing back in think June ⁓ or May. And I just jumped right in. I was super interested in the project. They were super inviting, which is always, you know, I know it's always a bit of apprehension for some folks with contributing the core and that sort of thing. It's like, does my contribution matter? And the team did a great job of really inviting me in, James especially. And then
just kind of formulated that relationship and by WordCamp US, we were starting to talk about like, oh, what if I came over to Automatic and worked with him? And so James is currently, like I said, head of it all. And what he wants to do is kind of shift, continue to, not shift so much, is continue to remain strongly within his strategic role of AI and wants to.
offload the more engineering heavy type decisions for AI. And so we're effectively splitting his role, you could say, and to make room for mine. So I will be the ⁓ director of engineering for AI and then he'll be the, I don't know, grand poobah of AI, you know, whatever his, his visionary ⁓ business oriented, like, you know, ultimately making the high level decisions. So yeah, it's been a,
Eric Karkovack (03:17)
The visionary.
Jason Adams (03:26)
Been a really great journey. There's so much to learn because there's so much happening. And AI changes every five minutes, so it's a tough subject to keep up with in itself.
Eric Karkovack (03:37)
Yeah, it kind of reminds me of when the block editor first came out. You would build something for the block editor and then a week later something would change and that would break and you'd have to go and kind of retool it. That kind of brings me to what you're doing with ⁓ the AI team.
I look at this and okay, I've read some of the posts and we'll put them in the show notes. So there's these different building blocks that you mentioned. We've got the PHP AI client SDK, right? The abilities API and the MCP adapter. how do these features work together? And I guess it's kind of a two part question. Actually, I'll save the second part to laughter because it's kind of complicated.
how do these features work together ⁓ in implementing AI into WordPress core?
Jason Adams (04:33)
Great question. So.
The end goal of what the core AI team is doing is trying to bring AI to, how do I say this, make AI something usable by people who do not deeply understand AI. AI of course is a deep, deep, deep, deep topic that goes far into how it actually works and so on and so forth, prompt and context engineering and all of this stuff.
And so the goal is to bring into the WordPress in such a way, one, that it's optional, because I there's been concern about that, or people are like, are you forcing AI on me? Nope. And two, is consumable in a way that's easy to understand and use. So a couple examples of that. So the Abilities API is ⁓ AI adjacent. ⁓
Eric Karkovack (05:16)
Yeah.
Jason Adams (05:34)
It is effectively a functional layer within WordPress, a way of defining functions or abilities. ⁓ When I actually first heard about the abilities API, what I got excited about actually had nothing to do with AI. ⁓ I come from a background of working with like TEC, GiveWP, LearnDash, those sorts of products. And ⁓
One thing that I've noticed, and I've also just been in WordPress for like 15 or 17 years now, is that everybody has a public API. Everybody has a way that they want their product to be integrated by other developers. This could be Gravity Forms, TC, whoever, right? There is no unified approach for how to do that. So every single product has their very own special snowflake way of having people integrate. Maybe it's functions, maybe it's classes.
Eric Karkovack (06:15)
Sure.
Jason Adams (06:30)
Maybe it's, know, fresh API, like there's no standard whatsoever. You don't really know how to integrate with something. You just hope they have good documentation and you just go for it. And so it is not because anybody's not trying, but because there's just no, there is no standard unified way of doing that in WordPress. And so the abilities API is that then once you've defined a function, then you can define the context that function.
Eric Karkovack (06:41)
That's a mess.
Yes.
Jason Adams (07:00)
can apply to so that could be the rest API that could be an MCP. So that shows up as a tool to some MCP server, you know, and so on and so forth. So, so the abilities APIs is that very, very foundational piece. MCP adapter is called the MCP adapter because we don't know at this time is MCP going to be around in three years? Like we really don't know actually.
⁓ and so all it does is it takes abilities and turns that into an MCP server with tools, prompts, and resources. and just by within the ability saying, yes, I want this to be available via MCP. but if MCP were to go away, it's not like you've suddenly lost something.
Eric Karkovack (07:50)
Okay.
Jason Adams (07:56)
Or if a new protocol were to come in, we could add a new adapter for that. ⁓ And then once again, in your ability, you add like a line or two to your, you know, your meta to say, yep, I want it to work with this protocol. And, but you're doing very, very small changes and it's being able to be exposed to different, you know, protocols with an AI. Then, go ahead.
Eric Karkovack (08:21)
I was going to ask, an example of that from what I was reading, is that something like we're telling the MCP that we want to be able to generate images with this model, or we want to generate text, certain tasks that we want it to do? Is that sort of how this works, or am I way off?
Jason Adams (08:44)
So MCP is the reverse. The MCP is you have some model out there in the world that wants to communicate with your application. so this could be ChatGBT, this could be Gemini, could be Cloud, could be whatever, right? ⁓ And it doesn't have access to your application in the sense that it can't just jump in and start calling functions.
And so instead, MCP is a way of you exposing things that that model can do safely within your application. ⁓ So you wouldn't say like, I want to generate an image from you model. The model would say, I want to change your site title. And then you would say, okay, well, if you want to change the site title, then ⁓ I need a one parameter, a string.
Eric Karkovack (09:24)
Okay.
Jason Adams (09:42)
Just give me that and then I'll change it. ⁓ Or I want to delete a post, I wanna update a post, I wanna publish a post, right? Like anything you can imagine that makes sense within WordPress, you're just exposing this as something that ⁓ the model can now do.
Eric Karkovack (10:00)
MCP seems like one of those abstract things that if you're not really deep in the weeds of this technology it's a little bit hard to understand so I'm glad you explained that. ⁓
Say I'm a plugin developer and I'm looking to add AI through these tools that you're creating. What is this? Is there like a specific starting point for me with that? is there one of these building blocks that I have to go to first?
Jason Adams (10:35)
Great question. So it really depends. There's kind of two different directions as the plugin developer that you're going to be thinking. You're going to either think I want to use AI to do something or I want to make myself available to AI. Right. So you're kind of defining two different lanes on this road. ⁓ MCP is one of the protocols for receiving. So you can you will allow your plugin to be
controllable by some model. And to do that, Abilities API. And then follow the documentation for doing things like exposing it to the REST API or MCP or that sort of thing. And as time goes on, we'll add more protocols and things like that. ⁓ I say we, but really I'm hoping the developer ecosystem also adds plugins that adds more of these things. On the other side, if you want to...
use AI in order to do something like generate images or create an excerpt from a post content or something like that, then that's where the WPAI client comes in. And the WPAI client, fundamentally, the most thing you will interact with the most is the plugin developer, it was called the prompt builder. So you'd literally write a line of code that's like AI client, colon, colon.
prompt and then you just pass it whatever your prompt is. On the simplest possible form, you can just say, you know, make me a picture of a cute cat and then call the method generate image. That's it. You've done it. You have now used AI as a plugin developer. You can of course get
way, way, way, way, way more complicated. You can get into like message history or you can get into things like temperature to control the randomness at which the AI operates. Like you have all sorts of parameters, but Felix and I, when we were designing that, Felix had this line that I really loved where he said, you know, we want to make ⁓ simple things easy and complicated things possible. So for somebody who just wants to write a really simple
a set of prompts to just generate images or generate text, it should be super, super easy to use. And then for folks have more advanced use cases, they can roll into it more and figure out all the more complicated ways of doing things. The other thing that the WPA client does, it's actually really important and kind of key to a lot of the strategy that we have going on is that it has what's called a model inference system.
It would be really annoying as a plugin developer if every time I wrote a prompt I had to specify which model I want to use this. It's only annoying in the sense that ⁓
I now have to be confident that that model is existing in this environment. And you know, we all know that the challenge of WordPress is that the environment is every single WordPress site out there. And so guaranteeing that you have, you know, GPT 5.2 on every single WordPress instance is not very good. And so
Eric Karkovack (14:01)
Exactly.
Jason Adams (14:17)
What the AI client will do if you don't specify a model is that it will try to find a model that is currently available in that environment that is compatible with the prompt that you just wrote. Like it's capable of doing everything you just described and it'll find it for you and use it. So the idea being that plugin developers can create these AI powered features.
without actually having to get involved in setting up the environment for AI to be available.
Eric Karkovack (14:50)
Yeah, that makes sense because...
As you said, if it has to be ChatGPT, a certain version of that, then you may only hit a few percent of sites that have it, right? ⁓ It's kind of a complex, I can imagine how complex that could get for someone who is just trying to build something. That's also one of the things that interests me about this because we have so many different models out there.
also spoke about, ⁓ perhaps, and we'll link to this in the show notes, that web hosts maybe should start offering their own AI services or maybe ⁓ partnering with ⁓ Google or OpenAI or providers like that.
Like how do you envision that working and what happens if, let's just say there are 100 hosts out there that do this and 75 of them want to use Gemini. How do you...
How do you prepare for that type of situation where you don't know what model is going to be used and is there a danger of possibly getting one being favored over the other within core? How do you stay agnostic to that?
Jason Adams (16:10)
Yeah, good question. ⁓ and I'll, I'll answer kind of a why question in there as well of like, you know, why even propose that in the first place? ⁓ you have really great AI plugins that exist and services that exist out there for WordPress right now. And, ⁓ like 10 up and others have some, and it's like, you talk to the people that run it and the
Pain point is the same across the board. The most painful part of the service is setting up the API key. You tell somebody, you have, you know, hey user, hey, you know, nonprofit owner, can you please go over to Anthropic and set up a, you know, a account and then a billing and then get an API key and then bring it back here? Like,
that you've just lost the vast majority of the market. It's just too complicated. And the reality is that like on device models and browser models and things like that are very much growing, but they're just not capable yet of doing what we imagine AI doing right now. So we're still dependent on cloud-based AI. ⁓ And so,
So to your question, the the hosting angle is basically saying like don't put that responsibility on your on the WordPress consumer to be able to set this up. Like we need to do that for them. we're hosting isn't the only way like Jetpack or others could also create a way for somebody to be able to have that available, especially on like, you know, like more bespoke hosting environments. But
Handling that yourself is, you know, if we actually want the end user to think of WordPress itself, not a specific host, not automatic, not whatever, but like if we want them to be like, ⁓ WordPress, WordPress has super, it does some amazing things. Then we have to take the burden off of them for that setup. They have to be able to take for granted the existence of AI. ⁓
⁓ And through things like hosting a jetpack and such right now is really the best way to go about that. doesn't, to your question, it doesn't really matter if everybody were to use Gemini or not. That's really at the discretion of the host. The WPI client purposely will not, when it's in 7.0, it will not ship with any single provider integration. ⁓
And that is because to your point, we don't want to rally behind somebody. ⁓ In fact, I would love to see a point where like there's a really good open source model and that's sort of a thing that we can really get behind. Like that's, that's, you know, closer to our ethos. ⁓ But for right now it's like, we want the WPA client to be compatible with anybody.
to has not coupled to any one person. So the host themselves would set up the provider and that's how it would all actually hook up and run is that that would be what they're doing is connecting a provider to the AI client. So now it works within their system and it doesn't matter to the client whether they're using Google or whether they actually are running some local model that they want. It doesn't really matter. And for the majority of folks, I think there will be a lot of like text.
basic text generation, image generation, where it's like, it honestly doesn't matter that much whether you have chat GPT or Gemini or whatever behind the hood, like it'll work well enough in most cases.
Eric Karkovack (20:12)
Do you envision the one-click install maybe already having that connection in it or having an option for that connection in it when you log in for the first time? We know we see hosts all the time with their platform-specific plugins that they put into place. Is that kind how you see this or is that something more... ⁓
under the hood that a developer would have to get into ⁓ when building out the site.
Jason Adams (20:44)
So I purposely tried not to answer these questions too much from my vantage point. And the reason being is not because I like, want to, you know, bury my head in the sand of a complicated question, ⁓ but because I really want to see the creativity of the hosting market itself approach this differently. You have some hosts that are more developer centric.
by their business model, in which case, you know, they can approach it from a more technical and advanced degree. You have other hosts that are really going after that very low technical level market, in which case, you know, just include it, bundle it, you know, you can market it and say like, it includes AI or whatever, but just include it in there. And, ⁓
you know, and then it's up to them if they want to, you know, do they want to limit based on tokens? They want to limit based on requests. Like how do they want to handle that? There's a really a lot of freedom. And for me, that's like a good thing. It's like this freedom to experiment and find the best way to go about that. and that also gives different hosts, different competitive advantage over one another. If somebody found a particularly clever way of doing that, others,
may even decide to use AI actually as a bit of a loss leader, right? And they may just go, you know what, we're gonna eat this because we think that this could like just standing out in this way could help drive up customers in a way that's worth it to us where if we're, you know, eating an extra, you know, $2 per site that we bring in this way, it's worth it to us. It's totally up to them to decide.
Eric Karkovack (22:43)
So that's kind of like the WordPress way anyway, right? mean, there's a million different ways to build something. Build it your way and do it the way that you think works best and adapt from there.
Jason Adams (22:55)
Yeah, exactly. And should be told, I don't even think that this is necessarily a like a WordPress specific ⁓ issue. I think hosts in general should be asking themselves what is their future with AI. Like that's just a question to be answered as a whole. ⁓ Whether you're doing WordPress hosting or not. I would just love to see WordPress become ⁓
something that when you're in an environment that has AI available, WordPress just works better. It just has features that show up. I think it should gracefully fall back. So if there is no AI in the environment, it doesn't break. It just doesn't have these like extra features. So like, let's just imagine that we have like a generate excerpt button next to the excerpt, right? And so it'll take the post content and it'll generate an excerpt so you don't have to write one.
If you're in an environment that supports that specific prompt, then the button shows up. And if you're not, the button doesn't show up. It's simple as that, but you know, it shouldn't be like the whole page crashes because it assumes that AI is present. And the WPI client has a way of trying to help people do exactly that in a very simple way so that you're not having to ask.
big complicated questions. What models are available? Is a I set up? What's the environment like? You don't have to do that. Just write your prompt and then there's a method that's like, uh, is text supported or something like that? I can't remember off hand, but basically just you get back a true or false. Is this environment set up to handle what you're about to do or not? And it's even flexible enough for, say that somebody went like the token limit route. Uh, and
some specific customer ran out of tokens, that can just return false and then things hide. Like it doesn't have to be tied to any one specific thing. hosts have a lot of flexibility over how that.
Eric Karkovack (25:09)
imagine there's quite a challenge for you all building this because as you mentioned before, all this stuff can change so quickly and you don't want to favor one provider over another.
How much time have you all spent trying to roadmap that part of it, just keeping it as open as possible, as flexible as possible? Because I could just imagine, every decision has to really be weighed carefully.
Jason Adams (25:41)
Yeah. ⁓ Yes, there's been a tremendous amount of time. I give a huge amount of credit to Felix Ernst. He came into the project with a massive amount. So he made a plugin called AI services, which is available on the dot org repository right now. So he took a lot of his experience from that.
Eric Karkovack (25:42)
That says it.
Jason Adams (26:07)
He's also highly familiar with the Versel AISDK. So fortunately, the idea of making a unified AI client, we did not invent that. ⁓ We're the first ones to make one that is PHP framework agnostic, ⁓ which is why, as a note, we have the PHP AI client and the WPAI client. PHP AI client is completely, it has no concept of WordPress or anything.
It's just strictly PHP and WPAI client is just a wrapper on top of that that connects it to WordPress. ⁓ So, but yes, like we are, we're constantly debating how we want to approach different scenarios right now, given the instance, more models are starting to get into multimodal output. In other words, ⁓ I asked chat GPT to make an image.
And then chat GPD spits back both the image and some text, which from a user standpoint feels so natural. But from an AI standpoint, it's like, well, hold on. You're doing two things now. You're giving me text and images. And so it's like, how are we going to handle that in a provider agnostic way? Like that's, you know, if you go to the GitHub repo right now, there's an issue for exactly that. And you'll see Felix and I debating it. So.
Eric Karkovack (27:20)
Yeah.
Jason Adams (27:31)
⁓ So yeah, but it's fun. It's a fun conversation.
Eric Karkovack (27:35)
Yeah, these things, I look back at two years or so ago and when these things first started hitting the mainstream and how much they've evolved and how much they will evolve ⁓ to be able to prepare for that. can't imagine. I don't think my brain goes that deep, so I'm glad somebody's does. ⁓ you, I know one of the goals is WordPress 7.0, right, to kind of implement.
Jason Adams (27:49)
Mm-hmm.
Eric Karkovack (28:05)
I mean, how is that going to look in WordPress 7.0? ⁓ To the person that installs WordPress, are they going to see anything different or is this really just under the hood? If I'm a developer and I want to implement it, it's going to be there, but there's just certain steps I'll have to take.
Jason Adams (28:25)
Yeah, exactly that. Think of it as like the interactivity API, right? Like that got introduced like four or five versions ago and like, wasn't like suddenly everybody was like, ooh, we're impressed with the interactivity API. ⁓ But as plugin developers started using it, then the ooh factor came in. But not because people, end users were like, I bet this uses the interactivity API under the hood. ⁓ They were just.
They just got the benefit of a better user experience and developers got the benefit of being able to create a better user experience with less time, effort and knowledge necessary. And it'll be similar with the AI client where no end user is going to get so stoked because that rolled into 7.0. ⁓ But plugin developers can and then people using TEC and all these other really great plugins out there.
⁓ they'll start to see these AI features show up at a remarkable rate because the rate of developing these AI powered features, that's what we really want to expedite. We want to make it so easy to make AI powered features that plugin developers, everything from large scale product companies to little folks just getting into it. ⁓
can incorporate these things into their plugin in a way that just feels so easy to do. And that's really where, ⁓ where it'll succeed because it, you know, WordPress lives and dies by the success of the ecosystem. It isn't all, all ships rise with the tide way of going about it. That's, that's the nature of open source like this. And so it's not necessarily the goal to be like,
how can we make WordPress core super AI impressive? It's how can we empower the entire ecosystem so that we're not trying to have WordPress succeed in the AI space at the efforts of a small core team, but of the entire WordPress ecosystem. That's the level and scale of creativity that we want to tap into. I want to see people do things with the client that I've never even thought of.
And I'm sure that will happen. We just have to make it really easy to use.
Eric Karkovack (30:54)
Yeah, that kind of...
brings me back in time, like maybe, like when you started with WordPress, when I started with WordPress in those days when it seemed like a new like killer plugin would come out every week and somebody would do something really creative and like why didn't I think of that type of situation? You can see that maybe coming with this if folks are able to go in there and you know, they don't have to necessarily focus on the minutia so much of how to get it to work, but they have a means to do that.
Jason Adams (31:11)
Mmm.
Eric Karkovack (31:26)
within WordPress core, then they can just let their creativity kind of run wild and see what happens from there.
Jason Adams (31:35)
Exactly.
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. If all I have to do is be creative about how to use AI and not worry about how to set it up, not worry about how to get the person to connect to it. If all of that is assumed and I'm just left with the one question of what do I want to build? That's a very exciting place to be.
Eric Karkovack (31:59)
So one last question. If you're looking ahead one year, what do you hope to see?
Jason Adams (32:01)
Mm.
I hope to see a tremendous amount of creativity by the ecosystem. That's really what it comes down to for me. Like I'm not putting all my eggs in the basket of automatic or 10 up or any of the large folks. Like, you know, you take all of those large scale companies and you put them to the scale of the entire WordPress ecosystem and they get suddenly quite small. You know, I want to see.
everybody using it in a way that just feels so fluent and so natural and so creative. Not just something I've been thinking about recently is like I also want people to break out of the chat bot UI mentality that when we think of AI we think of a chat UI. It's like that is a good UI but it's not the only UI. You know like I said earlier a you know generate excerpt button.
Eric Karkovack (32:55)
Yes.
Jason Adams (33:06)
a button, just a good old fashioned button, you know, end users don't have to know or care that something is AI powered. And so, but AI has such is such a force multiplier of taking something that would have otherwise, you just that example of taking post content and jittering and excerpt outside of an LLM, that would be a tremendous amount of work to achieve and actually come up with a valuable result.
Eric Karkovack (33:31)
Yeah.
Jason Adams (33:34)
but with an LLM, it's like a couple of lines of code. And so just, I want to see that kind of creativity all over the place within the plugin ecosystem. ⁓ And if we do that, and if we can start to associate WordPress in end users minds, not as honestly, for some people can feel like a bit of a dated CMS, but instead,
the first AI powered CMS out there, that would be fantastic.
Eric Karkovack (34:14)
kind of the gateway to the new world of AI.
Jason Adams (34:19)
Yeah, exactly. And in a way that is safe and approachable. I know AI really freaks a lot of people out. And I really do understand that there's so much ⁓ stigma around AI, even like just the literal phrase, artificial intelligence is decades old and has filled our minds with sci-fi for years. Like there's so much to it. There's also a lot of mistrust around it.
Eric Karkovack (34:43)
Yes.
Jason Adams (34:48)
You know, and so as like open source models and as local models and stuff become more prolific, I also want to make sure we get behind that as much as possible. But, you know, I want it to be something that people choose to integrate with, choose to get the benefits of or choose not to. And also, you know, for things like some folks deal with folks with like HIPAA compliance ⁓ type requirements and there are models.
that support that, but they need to have the control to be able to, to set that up and do that themselves. And so, you know, yes, I want to put, you know, I want to bring all the pieces together, but it needs to be the, you know, the prerogative of every WordPress site owner out there as to when and how they, bring AI into their workflows.
Eric Karkovack (35:45)
Yeah, it's going to be a wild ride here. I can't wait to see how this goes and what kind of interesting things people and useful things, of course, that people come up with. if folks want to learn more about all of this project, where can they go? What's the best place to get information?
Jason Adams (36:04)
⁓ The Make AI blog on WordPress.org is really the best place right now to do that. ⁓ We are trying to get more blog posts out, especially as we approach 7.0. There's also the Core AI channel and the Make WordPress Slack. ⁓
We try really hard to be very inviting there and if people have any questions, you don't have to be technical to go there You don't have to be like I'm going to contribute It's completely fine. If you just have questions or concerns that you want to raise and go there so This is not something that we're like trying to build in a closet and then thrust out into the world like we're trying really hard to be as open about this as we can
And so we really want feedback and contribution and all of that good stuff as much as possible.
Eric Karkovack (37:00)
Well, I think in the end that makes everything better, ⁓
Jason Adams (37:04)
That's right.
Eric Karkovack (37:05)
Well, Jason, I thank you so much for being a part of the show. Where can people connect with you online?
Jason Adams (37:12)
I linked in is a great place to find me. I have a blog Jason Adams. I'm actually about to Jason Adams dot com. I'm actually also about to re release that under Jason dot blog. But if you go to Jason Adams dot com it will redirect there as well. but yeah I try to be around. So you know feel free to reach out and I'll do my best to answer any questions or chat or whatever.
Eric Karkovack (37:42)
Well, thank you for being a part of the show and thanks to everyone for watching and listening to the WP Minute. I encourage you to go visit thewpminute.com slash subscribe. There you can receive our newsletter and find out how you can support the work that we do here on the WP Minute. We'll see you next time.
Jason Adams (38:00)
Thank
you.