Comment by viftodi
1 day ago
You are right to be skeptical.
There are plenty of so called windows(or other) web 'os' clones.
There were a couple of these posted on HN actually this very year.
Here is one example I google dthat was also on HN : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088777
This is not an OS as in emulating a kernel in javascript or wasm, this is making a web app that looks like the desktop of an OS.
I have seen plenty such projects, some mimick windows UI entirely, you xan find them via google.
So this was definitely in the training data, and is not as impressive as the blog post or the twitter thread make it to be.
The scary thing is the replies in the twitter thread have no critical thinking at all and are impressed beyond belief, they think it coded a whole kernel, os, made an interpeter for it, ported games etc.
I think this is the reason why some people are so impressed by AI, when you can only judge an app visually or only how you intetcat with it and don't have the depth of knowledge to understand, for such people it works all the way.land AI seems magical beyond comprehension.
But all this is only superficial IMHO.
Every time a model is about to be released, there are a bunch of these hype accounts that spin up. I don't know they get paid or they spring up organically to farm engagement. Last time there was such hype for a model was "strawberry" (o1) then gpt-5, and both turned out to be meaningful improvements but nowhere near the hype.
I don't doubt though that new models will be very good at frontend webdev. In fact this is explicitly one of the recent lmarena tasks so all the labs have probably been optimizing for it.
My guess is that there are insiders who know about the models and can’t keep their mouths shut. They like being on the inside and leaking.
I’d also bet my car on there being a ton of AI product/policy/optics astroturfing/shilling going on, here and everywhere else. Social proof is a hell of a marketing tool and I see a lot of comments suspiciously bullish about mediocre things, or suspiciously aggressive towards people that aren’t enthused. I don’t have any direct proof so I could be wrong, but it seems more extreme than a iPhone/Android (though I suspect deliberate marketing forces there, too,) Ford/Chevy brand-based-identity kind of thing, and naive to think this tactic is limited to TikTok and Instagram videos. The crowd here is so targeted, I wouldn’t be surprised if a single-digit percentage of the comments are laying down plausible comment history facade for marketing use. The economics might make it worthwhile for the professional manipulators of the world.
Its always amusing when "an app like windows xp" considered hard or challenging somehow.
Literally the most basic html/css, not sure why it is even included in benchmarks.
While it is obviously much easier than creating a real OS, some people have created desktop managers web apps, with resizeable and movable windows, apps such as terminals, nodepads, file explorer etc.
This is still a challenging task and requires lots of work to get this far.
Those things are LLMs, with text and language at the core of their capabilities. UIs are, notably, not text.
An LLM being able to build up interfaces that look recognizably like an UI from a real OS? That sure suggests a degree of multimodal understanding.
UIs made in the HyperText Markup Language are, in fact, text.