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Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

blog.cloudflare.com

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Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#321

Post by elicash »

potamic wrote: post #291
tstrimple wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"

Adopting a new technology often needs a lot of consideration. People will have a lot of questions, want to understand the implications and discuss with the hive mind. No need to attack them for that, I think.

I think tstrimple incorrectly thought it was a rhetorical question really meant to complain.

But my interpretation was like yours, that it was good faith and a literal question.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#322

Post by radlad »

alt227 wrote: post #301
radlad wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm obviously not saying that LLMs replace the glue between hardware and software. That would be absurd. An operating system is just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer. Surely you can imagine a world where you boot into a ChatGPT-like interface instead of the desktop OS you are familiar with? Different computing paradigms already exist: mobile OS sure, but also ChromeOS... heck, insta…

You seem to have a wrong definition of operating system in your head. The definition of Operating System is "The main software that manages a computer's hardware and software." An operating system is definitely not "just the interface a user has to the programs they run on their computer." > If you purchase a cloud VM... Then the operating system there is the link between the interface you are accessing and the under…

"The definition"? Whose? There are many definitions of "operating system" and I think it may be you who has it wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating_system#Definition_an...

Having a kernel, drivers, or firmware does not disqualify an operating system focused on LLM-usage from being an "agent operating system."

Do you agree that Android is an OS, or would you say that the OS is Linux and Android is simply a distribution? Is the operating system "Windows 11" or is it Windows NT kernel? Is UEFI an OS? ChromeOS? Language isn't always black-and-white.

You seemed to miss the cloud computing point: are you running one OS, or two? Does one OS running on top of another OS with virtualized hardware count? If yes, then why do you think an agent OS is incompatible with a traditional OS?

> An operating system is not just something that opens apps, it is the thing that lets you type, use a mouse, and see things on a screen. LLMs cannot do any of that, they are an app which runs on an OS.

An OS is all of these things. I never once claimed that an agent operating system would have a kernel which "is" an LLM. This is an absurd interpretation.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#323

Post by fl4regun »

sixdimensional wrote: post #318
thehamkercat wrote: post #2

Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid

You're missing the subtle marketecture trick here they are doing.. Non-technical people don't always think of an OS as the computer OS. To them, sometimes it means more like standard operating procedure or process - a standard way of doing things. Secondly, for tech products, calling yourself an OS, you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux. You are indirectly trying to grandstand and positi…

>you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux

But this is nothing like those things.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#324

Post by MWil »

rozenmd wrote: post #4

I liked Kenton's take on this: https://x.com/KentonVarda/status/2084990137180590572?s=20 Text from tweet: Today we are releasing Cloudflare OS, a chatbot with connectors, just like every other tech company is doing. Except actually, it's different. This is a remake of Sandstorm[.]io, my startup from 10 years ago, except this time built on Cloudflare Workers (the platform I've spent the last 9 years building) and deep…

I vividly remember Sandstorm. It was very intuitive and easy to use for a non-technical user like myself.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#327

Post by kentonv »

sixdimensional wrote: post #318
thehamkercat wrote: post #2

Why are companies slapping "OS" in their product naming? it's stupid

You're missing the subtle marketecture trick here they are doing.. Non-technical people don't always think of an OS as the computer OS. To them, sometimes it means more like standard operating procedure or process - a standard way of doing things. Secondly, for tech products, calling yourself an OS, you are associating yourself with things like Windows, Mac or Linux. You are indirectly trying to grandstand and positi…

You are reading WAY too much into it.

We aren't that clever about naming at Cloudflare.

Do you know how we named Wrangler, our local dev tool for Workers?

Literally, the person that created it said: "I named this Wrangler because I wanted to give it a name so dumb that we definitely won't release it under that name and will come up with something better."

We didn't come up with something better later.

Honestly Cloudflare OS is kinda same thing. We brainstormed names last week trying to come up with something better but nobody could agree on anything so it just went out as Cloudflare OS, which is what we'd been calling it internally for no particularly good reason.

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#329

Post by kentonv »

indigodaddy wrote: post #320
kentonv wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah sorry, only the providers I listed are supported right now. We'll be widening support soon.

How does the cloudflare-based deployment of cfos get updated? If I "redeploy" will it get updates from cfos upstream? Eg, for when you add new stuff like this upstream..

We're adding an update function.

Didn't need it yet on day one. :)

Re: Cloudflare OS: an open platform for agents, apps, and work

#330

Post by kentonv »

csomar wrote: post #312
tstrimple wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ffs there is literally no pleasing some people. "Hosting an open source project is too difficult! They should provide a free SaaS solution instead on their own cost but also no lock-in!!"

Open Source is a marketing term if your solution takes $2m worth of compute or devops time in order to run properly. The idea is, you have a way out if you want to leave. An option. But if leaving costs $x,xxx,xxx then that option was never there for most people. One example is NextJS. It's open source but even CloudFlare couldn't figure out how to run it properly on their platform.

It does not cost $2m of compute to run an instance of Cloudflare OS. I am running it on a random server in my basement.
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