As we all know in 1995 Microsoft released Clippy, they thought everyone would love it, but it didn't go as expected. It failed terribly and shortly after was removed or hidden into specific features. Nobody used it.

Now, in 2024, every company seems to be making the exact same mistake. Sure, the modern day assistants may be 100x more intelligent and better than Clippy, but at the end of the day, a 100x of a piece of garbage is simply a better and prettier piece of garbage.

Little silly LLM assistant startups are gathering millions of dollars in funding, many of them seem revolutionary and it may be true that they help us a lot with everyday tasks, but what people don't realise is that all these will be rendered obsolete once our modern day OS changes.

My vision

Currently inside our devices, everything is manual, there are very few automated tasks. We still need to open browsers, manually look for specific settings to change, we still get unreadable error messages and we spend most of our time figuring out how to do things rather than doing them. In the future OS, everything will simply be an API to "our LLM". I like to think of this Operating System the same way we see our home Wifi router, let me explain. We normally have one router per home and all the devices in our household connect to it, it's the home's gateway to the internet, everything coming in and out goes through it. Well, this same way, we will have our "Home LLM", a gateway for the entire house to the internet, it will be private as it runs locally (I am a huge advocate for data privacy and think this is a major concern) and everyone's device will use it to do their everyday tasks. This allows for once single device to have context of your entire life, it will have contextual awareness over everything, an adaptive interface and very good predictive assistance. This will be the pinnacle of user experience. The EVERYTHING computer.

I think the first step for this is clearly a LLM Computer with it's own dedicated OS, but the final idea is much bigger. That computer will grow to be something else which I don't quite have a word for yet, but it's much bigger than a personal computer.

We've seen hints at this with things like Alexa which are garbage and I think voice assistance is not as good UX as people think it is, so it's in a completely wrong direction.

People don't give a fuck about the tech

When I did a lot of work in crypto I would always say that best crypto UX is not even knowing that you're using crypto. People should be clueless as to what happens on the backend because they don't care (Apple used to do this well). Just give the people good UX and they will be happy. This same way, the best AI is not even knowing you're using an AI, it should just be pure magic and bliss. You shouldn't even be able to think "how does this thing work" because it's so good it just seems like something from another world.

In the tech world and in SF, everyone jerks themselves with the idea of "X amount parameter models" and all these fancy benchmarks and a bunch of useless numbers on a screen. At the end of the day nobody cares outside of this world, they just care if it makes their life better. You can see this with iPhone cameras, people don't even know how many megapixels their camera has, whereas back in the day you would go crazy for a few megapixel upgrade. Cameras with more megapixels don't necessarily take better pictures, they've gotten so good with the software behind the camera that the hardware doesn't really matter as much.