From the GitHub page:
reply This is not a traditional computer operating system. We use the term "operating system" in two senses:
- An operating system for the company to be productive with AI, in a way that is safe, so that the security team can sleep at night.
- An operating system for AI workloads, analogous to the sense in which a traditional operating system manages compute workloads.Wow this is really poor justification for its name, the folks at cloudflare really should not be overloading the term "Operating System" pointlessly like this.
replyIt looks to me like they just wanted to distinguish their product from other AI agents/sandboxes, so they called it an OS to make it sound bigger and better.
replyIt's awful naming if they have to explain it.
replythe people criticizing the vibecoded name knows what they meant, it is just not correct. It is the same as vegan meat.
replyExcluding vegetables from what convey “meat” was also not correct around 1300-1500. Definitions changes with usage and only time will tell the future of vegan steaks, meats, milks, sauvages, butters and other parties.
reply> food, nourishment, sustenance
> Narrower sense of "flesh of warm-blooded animals killed and used as food" is attested from c. 1300
Because it sounds impressive to clueless people ($).
replyMostly to get trolls to retweet and complain about it for free advertising. It's working. ;)
replyI think because the idea of an "agent operating system" is starting to feel more and more inevitable. Since I can use AI to:
reply - Pull information from external sources
- Transform and/or augment that information
- Publish information
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
reply> I almost do not need a traditional OS anymore.
replyYou sure about that?
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replysmells like lock-in to me.
replyDoes your LLM have hardware drivers in it? this is silly.
replyThis is really approaching peak AI psychosis
replyAgreed, its like OSes have become so invisible people have actually forgotten what they do.
replyBut "virtual machine" is not? Maybe "Virtual OS" is more acceptable?
replyI agree, it has now become a cliche buzzword that product managers slap on boring non-technical things to make them sound important.
replyIsn’t there even a bug tracker that some company calls an ‘issue OS’ or something absurd?
Because AI enables a new layer more akin to an actual OS. But also because I imagine they all want all the things running through them and an OS is the widest net they can cast in that direction.
replyCause they’re trying to build an ecosystem
replyi too clicked the link by this exactly 2 characters, "OS" should NOT be used in this way.
replySame reason why grifters adopted web3 when Web 3.0 was already an established term.
replyAndy Jassy et al didn't quite name it that, but AWS was being thought of internally as "Internet OS".
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replyI disagree. Harness is a pretty great word, and it doesn't already have another familiar meaning.
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