[nhod]

A million years ago in AI time, AKA yesterday, there was a HN post from John Carmack talking about how Meta wasted a ton of time and money making XROS and how nowadays it doesn’t make any sense to write a new OS [1].

And then this post today which makes a very strong case for it. (Yes, a VM isn’t an entire OS, Yes, it would be lighter weight than a complete OS. Yes, it would be industry-wide. Yes, we’d likely use an existing OS or codebase to start. Yes, nuance.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45066395

[raincole]

Two completely different things. And you knew they're completely unrelated but still forced the comparison for unknown reason...

> And then this post today which makes a very strong case for it

After reading this post I saw nothing making a very strong case for a VM, let alone a new OS. They just want access controls.

[conradev]

Yes. It’s just access controls. When people advocate for greater separation I remind them that separation is just one part of the cycle:

https://xkcd.com/2044/

We’re in the “connect everything” phase (MCP), and are about to enter into the “wow that’s a mess” phase

[ijk]

I think the main difference is that sandboxing and simplifying the LLM's access to tools and data tends to be core functionality, whereas for XR it is more about performance and developer experience.

I'm going to put a lot of work in anyway to keep the LLM from accidentally overwriting the code running it or messing with customer data incorrectly or not being overwhelmed with implementation details; having a standard for this makes it much easier and lets me rely on other people's model training.

If it's merely that I have to train a dev on an XR SDK, I can pay them a salary or encourage schools to teach it. AI needs an team for an R&D project and compute time, which can get a lot more expensive at the high end.

[charcircuit]

This article does not make a case for writing a new operating system. Building an execution environment for an AI to operate in is completely different from creating a new operating system from scratch designed to be optimized for an AI use case.

[7373737373]

WebAssembly with its sandboxing-by-default paradigm is pretty much halfway there, just need a well defined interface to transfer data and access rights between instances, and creating new instances from others.

[cpuguy83]

https://microsoft.github.io/wassette/ does just this, using wasi components.

[spankalee]

That's what WASI components already are.

[saagarjha]

This is a technical solution to a social problem