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Comment by aurareturn | Hacker News Reader

This is partly why I believe OS makers, Apple, Microsoft, Google, have a huge advantage in the future when it comes to LLMs.

They control the OS so they can combine and feed all your digital information to an LLM in a seamless way. However, in the very long term, I think their advantage will go away because at some point, LLMs could get so good that you don't need an OS like iOS anymore. An LLM could simply become standalone - and function without a traditional OS.

Therefore, I think the advantage for iOS, Android, Windows will increase in the next few years, but less powerful after that.

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An LLM is an application that runs on an operating system like any other application. That the vendor of the operating system has tied it to the operating system is purely a marketing/force-it-onto-your-device/force-it-in-front-of-your-face play. It's forced bundling, just like Microsoft did with Internet Explorer 20 years ago.

I predict that OpenAI will try to circumvent iOS and Android by making their own device. I think it will be similar to Rabbit R1, but not a scam, and a lot more capable.

They recently hired Jony Ive on a project - it could be this.

I think it'll be a long term goal - maybe in 3-4 years, a device similar to the Rabbit R1 would be viable. It's far too early right now.

Even if this is true (and I'm not saying it's not), they probably won't create their own OS. They'd be smarter to do what Apple did and clone a BSD (or similar) rather than start afresh.

Would be extremely surprising if it were anything other than an Android fork. The differentiator is gonna be the LLM, always on listening and the physical interface to it.

You're just burning money bothering to rewrite the rest of the stack when off the shelf will save you years.

The LLM would become the OS.

An LLM cannot "become" an OS. It can have an OS added to it, for sure, but that's a different thing. LLMs run on top of a software stack that runs on top of an OS. Incorporating that whole stack into a single binary does not mean it "becomes" an OS.

And the point stands: you would not write a new OS, even to incorporate it into your LLM. You'd clone a BSD (or similar) and start there.

I don't think you're getting the main point. The only application that this physical device would run is ChatGPT (or some successor). You won't be able to install other apps on it like a normal OS. Everything you do is inside this LLM.

Underneath, it can be Linux, BSD, Unix, or nothing at all, whatever. It doesn't matter. That's not important.

OS was just a convenient phrase to describe this idea.

I got your main point from the first message, but still don't like redefining terminology like OS to mean what you did.

Think of iOS and everything that it does such as downloading apps, opening apps, etc. Replace all of that with ChatGPT.

No need to get to the technicals such as whether it's UNIX or Linux talking to the hardware.

Just from a pure user experience standpoint, OpenAI would become iOS.

I don't think "OS" means anything definitive. It's not 1960. Nowadays, it's a thousand separate things stuck together.

I think what you mean is "Desktop" not "OS". You're just replacing all the windows, menus and buttons with a chat interface.

The LLM can't abstract PCI, USB, SATA etc from itself.

What counts as an OS is subjective. The concept has always been a growing snowball.

This is a similar situation to the view that the web would replace operating systems. All we'd need is a browser.

I don't think AI is ultimately even an application, it's a feature we will use in applications.

> This is a similar situation to the view that the web would replace operating systems. All we'd need is a browser.

well, that's not a false statement. As much as I might dislike it, the raise of the web and web applications have made the OS themselves irrelevant for a significant number for tasks.

I’m not even sure if they can make a website that takes text input to an executable and dumps the output.

even then, the llm cannot possibly be a standalone os. For one thing, it cannot execute loops. So even something as simple as enumerating hardware at startup is impossible.

Good comment. From Apple's point of view, AI could be a disruptive innovation: they've spent billions making extremely user-friendly interfaces, but that could become irrelevant if I can just ask my device questions.

But I think there will be a long period when people want both the traditional UI with buttons and sliders, and the AI that can do what you ask. (Analogy with phone keyboards where you can either speech-to-text, or slide to type, or type individual letters, or mix all three.)

I cannot tell you how much this echoes what people were saying during the dot com days :) Of course back then it was browsers and not LLMs. Looking back, people were both correct about this, yet we’re still having the same conversation about replacing the OS cartel.

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