Comment by TheDong
9 hours ago
> why buy Windows and Office when I can just ask claude to write me my own versions instead? Why run a commodity operating system on kiosks?
Linux costs $0. Creating a linux clone compatible with your hardware from the hardware spec sheets with an AI for complicated hardware would cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens, and you'd end up with something that works worse than linux (or more likely something that doesn't even boot).
Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use?
Even if software becomes cheaper to write, it's not free, and there's a lot of software (especially libraries) out there which is free.
> cost thousands to millions of dollars in tokens
> Even if the price falls by a thousand fold, why would you spend thousands of dollars on tokens to develop an OS when there's already one you can use?
Why do you assume token price will only fall a thousand fold? I'm pretty sure tokens have fallen by more than that in the last few years already - at least if we're speaking about like-for-like intelligence.
I suspect AI token costs will fall exponentially over the next decade or two. Like Dennard scaling / Moore's law has for CPUs over the last 40 years. Especially given the amount of investment being poured into LLMs at the moment. Essentially the entire computing hardware industry is retooling to manufacture AI clusters.
If it costs you $1-$10 in tokens to get the AI to make a bespoke operating system for your embedded hardware, people will absolutely do it. Especially if it frees them up from supply chain attacks. Linux is free, but linux isn't well optimized for embedded systems. I think my electric piano runs linux internally. It takes 10 seconds to boot. Boo to that.