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Comment by radlad

2 months ago

I think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to:

  - Pull information from external sources
  - Transform and/or augment that information
  - Publish information

I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore. This obviously isn't entirely true: I still use it to interact directly with humans, and it's the way I access my LLM. For now.

18 comments

radlad

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arandomhuman  2 months ago

You need a "traditional" operating system to even run your LLM, or do you have your own custom collection of drivers you flash your machine with? :p

  • radlad  2 months ago

    I already mentioned this:

    > This obviously isn't entirely true: [...] it's the way I access my LLM.

    It doesn't change my opinion that there's a very real possibility that we move to thin clients or microkernels intended primarily to run chat interfaces (or some other UI that organizes LLM sessions and their outputs) either locally on the hardware, or against cloud computing environments. An operating system is just the interface a user has with their computer.

    More to the point - it is possible to run an operating system on top of another operating system: this is what VMs are. I'm obviously not claiming that LLMs replace the glue between hardware and software(?!)

EasyMark  2 months ago

smells like lock-in to me.

  • radlad  2 months ago

    I'm not advocating for this model. But I'm also not sure it has any more lock-in than choosing an OS today: Windows, macOS, Linux, ChromeOS, Android, iOS.

tkel  2 months ago

Does your LLM have hardware drivers in it? this is silly.

  • radlad  2 months ago

    I'm obviously not saying that LLMs replace the glue between hardware and software. That would be absurd.

    An operating system is just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer. Surely you can imagine a world where you boot into a ChatGPT-like interface instead of the desktop OS you are familiar with?

    Different computing paradigms already exist: mobile OS sure, but also ChromeOS... heck, install Arch Linux and you're dropped into a shell by default - not a GUI. How is this so different?

    And it doesn't even have to replace your existing OS to be your operating system: If you purchase a cloud VM (say from AWS or DigitalOcean), you're likely running an operating system on top of another operating system already.

    • alt227  2 months ago

      You seem to have a wrong definition of operating system in your head. The definition of Operating System is "The main software that manages a computer's hardware and software."

      An operating system is definitely not "just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer."

      > If you purchase a cloud VM...

      Then the operating system there is the link between the interface you are accessing and the underlying hardware on the physical server.

      An operating system is not just something that opens apps, it is the thing that lets you type, use a mouse, and see things on a screen. LLMs cannot do any of that, they are an app which runs on an OS.

      5 replies →

  • alt227  2 months ago

    Agreed, its like OSes have become so invisible people have actually forgotten what they do.