Humane Is Trying to License Its Operating System, a Move It Swears Was the Strategy All Along ⇥ crazystupidtech.com

Om Malik, at his new Crazy Stupid Tech publication — which, according to its mission statement, is a compliment — interviewed Humane founders Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri about how things are going:

Lost in the barbs about the botched hardware was the fact that a new kind of operating system powered the AI Pin. It was clear that AI Pin wasn’t merely a hardware wrapper for ChatGPT; it was software developed for the oncoming AI future.

Sitting across from me, Chaudhri is sharing details about lessons learned and his company’s core product, CosmOS, the AI operating system. The company now plans to license the software to those interested in AI-powered devices.

There is a diagram in this article illustrating the difference between the architecture of a “traditional O.S.” and that of this “A.I. operating system”, and I think I understand it — but only kind of. The way I interpret Malik’s explanation is that it works almost like a mix of plugins and a sort of universal data layer.

The way this was demonstrated to Malik was as though it was a car’s operating system. Malik says it was “much more intelligent than, say, an Alexa device”, which might very well be true. But the skills which were demonstrated are nominally possible with assistants that already exist in smartphone operating systems, albeit in a way that sounds far less sophisticated than Humane is able to deliver. If you have a relatively recent car, you can plug in your phone and get very close to that capability today.

I am reminded of Jason Snell’s article from the week of the A.I. Pin’s launch, in which he pointed out “how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies”. The hard part for Humane — whether pinned to your shirt or installed in your car’s dashboard — is that it wants you to maintain an entirely new digital space in a world of far bigger companies that want to keep you in their insular environments.

Malik:

Licensing an operating system can be a lucrative business. Microsoft’s Windows windfall is legendary. However, there are other less obvious examples. In 1998, I wrote about a company called Integrated Systems that made an OS for devices ranging from dishwashers to microwaves. In 2000, it merged with Wind River Systems, and their OS powered all these devices that are computers but don’t look like computers — washing machines, for example. Wind River is now owned by Intel.

Wind River was sold by Intel in 2018 to TPG, a private equity firm, nine years after buying it for $884 million. The financial terms of TPG’s purchase were not disclosed, which does not suggest Intel made a killing and kind of implies it lost money. Just four years and predictable layoffs later, it sold the company for $4.3 billion. This is not really a correction to Malik’s point; more of an addition.

Update: If the idea behind an A.I. operating system is that it can figure out just the right process for the current task, and Danny Gonzalez’s experience is anything to go by, count me out. No thank you.