alt Hacker NewsIn an agentic world, the OS needs to be completely rethought. For example, every single app functionality should be exposable via an API while remaining human friendly.
I think OpenAI designing their own phone is the next logical step. I hope they succeed which should bring major competition to Apple and Android.
Replies
At the beginning of the internet we were promised the free flow of digital information between computers, peer-to-peer. What we got was silos of content each fighting each other to make sure that the silos stay intact with DRM.
I could imagine an AI future where agentic shopping companies who promise me the best deal are pitted against Walmart and Amazon, trying to algorithmically squeeze me for $2 more- just two bots playing a cat and mouse game to save me a few bucks.
For some reason a lot of tech ends up in these antagonistic monopolies- Apple wants to sell privacy aware devices as a product feature, Google wants give you mail and maps, but sell your data. Despite any appearances neither give a shit about you, even if you benefit from the dynamic.
I still have to understand what my AI agents could do that I don't want to do myself. Buy stuff? No thanks, I want to see what I buy. I think that they are 99% a solution in search of a problem.
Everything exposed programmatically would have been great even without agents—the NixOSes and Emacses of the world show just how amazing a fully flexible and programmable world would be—but I'm glad that the advent of AI is getting people invested in this vision :P
> I think OpenAI designing their own phone is the next logical step. I hope they succeed which should bring major competition to Apple and Android.
This is not going to happen, or if it does it will just be Android (like Samsung reskins/modifies it) and it will certainly use Google Play Services.
Openai should not design a phone... They should try making money first
> In an agentic world, the OS needs to be completely rethought
Isn't that what Apple is doing with its Foundation Models Framework?[0] Developers can integrate Apples on device llm that includes things like tool calling. I don't write Apple specific apps so not sure what can actually be done with it, but it looks promising and something Apple already seems to think things are headed.
> I think OpenAI designing their own phone is the next logical step
ChatGPT is already integrated into Apple Intelligence for those that want to use that instead of Apples model -- I don't see OpenAI trying to change lanes into phone making when they can focus on doing what they know while collecting a large check from Apple
[0] https://developer.apple.com/documentation/foundationmodels
"In an agentic world, the OS needs to be completely rethought" - if AI is progressing as fast as we think it is, I don't think we'll be interested in waiting for the world to rebuild all the legacy tooling from the OS up. For new stuff, that'd be great.
I imagine the AIs will get a lot better at intercepting things at an intermediate level - API calls under the hood, etc. Probably much better (and cheaper) vision abilities, and perhaps even deeper integration into the machine code itself. It's really hard to anticipate what an advanced model will be capable of 5 years from now.
> In an agentic world, the OS needs to be completely rethought. For example, every single app functionality should be exposable via an API while remaining human friendly.
So, like a Unix system?
We used to have this. It was called OLE Automation.
In other words, AppleScript in the late '90s.
This is like insisting - after the problem turns out to be harder than thought - that the worlds roads need to be completely redone to make them self driving friendly, so self driving can work.
Isn’t the whole ‘promise’ of AI that it doesn’t need any of those things?
We have a much better chance of an ai-addressable Harmony OS version than of OpenAI making a serious competitor.
It doesn't need to be mobile. The AI-first OS will be headless, undoubtedly.
Humans would be the second-class users of said OS, which can generate UIs on demand as needed.
I've thought about this quite a bit. Started implementing as a side project, but I have too many side projects at the moment...
That’s actually what the Reflex plugin behind the APIs in the benchmark does. It creates APIs from your app’s event handlers, thereby providing a stateful way for agents to navigate apps.
It’s why we did this benchmark :) - reflex team member
Android is working on it. See AppFunctions.
We'll just close the loop with a systemd MCP, set the shell to /usr/bin/codex, and find some other way to pay the bills.
Perfect.
One of the most seductive (and destructive) forces in software is the desire to rewrite from scratch because rewrites never, ever, ever go as planned. With AI, we're now thinking it's a good idea to rewrite the entire platform from the ground-up. Wild.
Presumably on Linux at least apps could just expose a DBus API? The machinery for this is already in place as far as I can tell.
Why not use the same acc disability features?
And when the agent fucks up badly (as we've seen over and over again) who will be held accountable? The user?
The GUI was a mistake. Long live the shell!
Ah yes. The trains everywhere approach to self driving cars.
Lots of apps actually do have all their functionality exposable via an API - but it's an internal API that's hidden from the user.
[dead]
This will not happen. None of the existing apps people use daily on their phones have any incentive to support this. Social media wants the people to doomscroll, shopping apps and booking sites want to use their own dark patterns to make people believe they get a special discount if they buy _now_ and everything else just wants users to see the ads. Why on earth would they offer convenient hooks for AI chatbots?