Ex-Google execs set to build an online operating system for AI agents

Would you like all your data and digital life surrendered to agentic AIs in the cloud?

by · TechSpot

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A hot potato: Autonomous agents that can act and make decisions by themselves are the latest trend in today's ever-growing AI hype cycle. Many companies are working on complex, hallucination-prone AI agents, but a new venture is apparently trying to go much further.

Hugo Barra, David Singleton, and other former Android "leaders" have just unveiled /dev/agents, a new start-up focused on agentic AI technology. The company wants to create what is likely the first operating system for AI agents, a common framework capable of bringing different AI services and communication means under one roof.

Barra was Android's public face from 2008 to 2013, when he acted as Google representative during the annual developer-focused I/O conferences. In his official X announcement, the executive said that the new company he founded will go back to Android's roots, which means the focus will be building a new operating system essentially from scratch.

Singleton, who is the company's co-founder, was Android's VP of engineering before working as chief technology officer at fintech company Stripe. He told Bloomberg that current AI technology needs an Android-like moment. "We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it's just too hard to build anything good," he said.

Nvidia explains that agentic AI should be considered as the next (wild?) frontier of artificial intelligence development. Agentic AI systems can use complex reasoning and iterative planning algorithms to solve complex problems all by themselves. The user, or the end customer, provides an AI agent with some initial instructions in prompt form, and the algorithms will magically solve all their problems for good.

According to /dev/agents' founders, AI agents can flourish if they are hosted in a common, cloud-based operating system. This hypothetical internet OS would work across different devices, Singleton said, providing users with a new UI paradigm to interact with complex agentic AI tech on smartphones, computers, automotive platforms, and more.

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The newly announced start-up has already acquired the initial funds ($56 million) needed to start working on the new OS project. Barra said that /dev/agents will hire people interested in building things at the intersection of consumer and developer tech. Engineers who worked on three different generations of operating systems (Android, wearable gadgets, augmented reality) will join the plan.

Bloomberg's report stated that the new team is also welcoming Ficus Kirkpatrick, an early Android engineer, and ChromeOS designer Nicholas Jitkoff, as chief technology officer and chief design officer, respectively.