Sure, a few thoughts as to why: - at some point, look at what they have they can do to grow to satisfy shareholders - AI companies have been acquiring companies that make developer tools - that is the build side - but once they've exhausted that, if they want to keep growing, what do they go after? Bigger and better models at ad infinitum? I don't think they can go on like that forever, and, if optimization of AI and competition keeps cutting into their main business line of LLMs etc, they have to diversify. - If everyone has the power to make apps, there is only so far you can go there - my guess is that the pressures to reinvent regular things like office suites, email clients, calendars to be integrated into their desktop tooling is part of this - who is in the best position to be the platform/front door for everything, if everything depends on AI? - when have these kinds of companies ever said "this boundary is enough"? It never happens, they keep going, keep trying to find ways to expand, capture, build moats, etc. - look at what their desktop apps are turning into - they are already an application layer and becoming moreso every day, at some point they will ask - why are we sitting on these other OSes... we have enough money and we can get into more "hard" engineering things, like building hardware using their own tech (which they are already experimenting with), and if you're building the hardware, why not build the OS? - and, what is an OS in the future? Have you considered what a post-AI OS even looks like? Does it need a start menu? Does it need any of the legacy stuff? Is it a local software factory?

There is someone already experimenting in this space - the guy who founded Basecamp and is building Omarchy [1] Linux... he sees it.. how long until these companies do?

If they don't build this, what will Microsoft do? Both Microsoft and Apple are well down their way, Apple is probably further ahead, but neither of them are the frontier model companies.

"Everybody will try to build an AI OS", but which ones are the most likely to survive in our current economic system?

If our economic system was based on partnership, I might agree there isn't much point in these companies building OSes, but ours is based on competition and domination generally... so unless the AI bubble truly does pop and the funding stops (which it may of course), how else do they keep fueling their stock prices to dominate the market?

I think something is going to have to give somewhere in the chain... otherwise the ease with which any software can be replaced will be too high and I suspect they will be forced to compete.

One last thought - between Microsoft/Apple or Anthropic/OpenAI - long term - who is in a better position? The debate arises from that question, in my opinion.

[1] https://omarchy.org/

One more piece - say Google Gemini gets way better than OpenAI or Anthropics offering, or Microsoft Copilot etc gets way better...

If Microsoft or Google's AI is killing it, and it's built into the OS, how will Anthropic or OpenAI compete unless we run into the same old antitrust/competition issues with OS?

At that point, they might just say - "fine, it's easier to just have our big AI brains and money make a new OS we control and we can compete too."

Again, why bother why IT? Just do the things that IT is built to help build. Solve medicine, energy and materials directly, instead of competing at AI integration.

I see your point. You're proposing they can just do an end run around the "business and world problems" directly.

I guess that could be a thing, but, that puts them in competition with the people who they might want to be their customers, whereas I don't necessarily know that they would see other tech companies as customers unless they were super interested in partnerships.

According to "the normal progression of companies" though, you might be right because after a company has becoming big enough and exhausts consuming its own market, it often expands into verticals - we've seen that with traditional big 5 consulting companies or IBM, where they expanded into "working embedded with their customers on their problems directly" many years ago, and now every company in the industry approaches it that way.

That is corporate partnership and field work, not so much consuming the other person's work/business... whereas I could see them just consuming the OS because "it's no big deal when you can do everything you need with AI".

But I take your point.