Readit Newsyuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
I didn't get to do much. Had a hard time clicking on Firefox and then getting to the nav bar and type in "Hackernews". Boy was that wild watching it type. Those definitely weren't letters. Then it tried to translate the page for me into Finish and weirdly the "I'm not a robot" box would appear, disappear, and then I'd see the title of some paper. I never actually made it to the Google results...
It's an interesting project. I'll totally accept "for fun" or "because" but I'm interested in the why. Even if just a very narrow thing, is there any benefits we would get from using a ML based OS? I mean it is definitely cool and that has merit in its own right, but people talk about Neural OSs and I just don't "get it"
Thanks for the feedback! Yes, the demo is definitely limited. The reason I built NeuralOS is that I'm excited about a future where boundaries between software categories fade away. Imagine converting a movie directly into an interactive video game, customizing app interfaces by talking to it, or sharing the same underlying physics/world model between movies and games. Perhaps someday, movies or even interactive games could just be detailed text prompts describing scenes and characters, with the OS "hallucinating" everything on the fly (maybe movies adapt to user preferences as well so different users watch different "versions" of the same underlying movie plot). This minimizes storage and download times, but also provides maximal flexibility.
Unlike other ML-based OS projects (such as Gemini OS, which generates code and renders traditional UIs), NeuralOS directly generates every pixel. While this makes it susceptible to hallucination, in my opinion the other side of hallucination is full flexibility. In the future, I imagine operating systems running entirely (or mostly) on GPUs, adapting to user intent on the fly rather than relying on pre-designed menus and options.
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
What does it mean when you say "operating system powered by neural network"? Does it have a kernel space and user space with hard defined boundaries or is the network determining what function call is being made and switches the space based on it? what about security? what about networking? what about program execution? how does this actually work?
When we say "powered by a neural network," we mean something fundamentally different from a traditional OS (or even gemini os). NeuralOS is essentially a video generation model that "hallucinates" every pixel on the screen in response to user inputs (mouse movements, clicks, keyboard inputs).
There is no underlying kernel, no function calls, no program execution, and no networking. Everything is purely visual and imagined by the neural model. You can think of it as a safe, isolated container where nothing can actually run or cause harm, since no real code executes. It's essentially an interactive video simulation, conditioned entirely on user inputs.
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
In response to complaints about the laggy demo experience (due to limited GPU resources), I've now set up a huggingface space version for developers:
https://huggingface.co/spaces/yuntian-group/neural-os
Note: The Space is intended as a template, so please duplicate it and run with your own GPU for a better experience. (The default Space has only one worker.)
Recommended GPU: At least an L40, ideally an A100-large. (The original demo at neural-os.com used H100s.)
All code and models are self-contained in the huggingface space.
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
Nǐ hăo, xìe xìe Yuntian!
I read the readme and paper but haven’t played around much yet. I find this fascinating and I don’t care much about poor “experience” because intuitively I feel this idea couldn’t produce something as reliable and flexible as a real OS anyway. I see you talked about inability to install new software and my reaction was “well obviously”, because surely it will be at least as limited as the training data, while a real OS provides lots of software of great complexity which is seldom used.
Could you talk about your hopes for the future on this project? What are your thoughts on having a more simplified interface which could combine inputs in a more abstract way, or are you only interested in simulating a traditional OS?
Thanks again.
PS the waiting time while firefox “loads” made me laugh. I presume this is also simulated.
Thanks for your comment! I completely agree that currently NeuralOS is far from being as reliable as a real OS. The Firefox loading time is indeed a funny artifact of the neural model simulating delay in real OS.
However, my real dream behind this project is to blur the boundaries across applications, not just simulate traditional OS interactions. For example, imagine converting a movie we're watching directly into an interactive video game, or instantly changing the interface of an app (like Signal) to something we prefer (like Facebook Messenger) on the fly.
Of course, the current training data severely limits what's achievable today. But looking forward, I envision combining techniques from controllable text generation (such as Zhiting Hu's "Toward Controlled Generation of Text" paper) or synthesizing new interaction data to achieve greater and customization. I believe this is a promising path toward creating truly generative and personalized interfaces.
Thanks again for your interest!
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
seems similar to this: https://aistudio.google.com/apps/bundled/gemini_os?showPrevi...
although i wasn't able to really use it due to lag
Actually NeuralOS works very differently from Gemini OS. NeuralOS directly generates each screen at the pixel level entirely from neural networks, while Gemini OS generates code that's then rendered into a traditional UI. This difference is why NeuralOS is much slower and currently runs at a lower frame rate.
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
Thanks everyone for trying out NeuralOS, and apologies for the frustrating user experience!
I coded up the demo myself and didn't anticipate how disruptive the intermittent warning messages about waiting users would become. The demo is quite resource-intensive: each session currently requires its own H100 GPU, and I'm already using a dispatcher-worker setup with 8 parallel workers. Unfortunately, demand exceeded my setup, causing significant lag and I had to limit sessions to 60 more seconds when others are waiting. Additionally, the underlying diffusion model itself is slow to run, resulting in a frame rate typically below 2 fps, further compounded by network bottlenecks.
As for model capabilities, NeuralOS is indeed quite limited at this point (as acknowledged in my paper abstract). That's why the demo interactions shown in my tweet were minimal (opening Firefox, typing a URL).
Overall, this is meant as a proof-of-concept demonstrating the potential of generative, neural-network-powered GUIs. It's fully open-source, and I hope others can help improve it going forward!
Thanks again for the honest feedback.
yuntian commented on NeuralOS: An operating system powered by neural networks neural-os.com/... · Posted by u/yuntian
A generative operating system that directly predicts screen images based on mouse and keyboard inputs, powered by an RNN for state modeling and a diffusion model for image generation.
See my tweet for more details: https://x.com/yuntiandeng/status/1944802154314916331
- Covers a wide range of topics and languages, all from actual users in the wild.
- Includes 122K conversations from reasoning models (o1-preview and o1-mini) which are long, often involving complex problem solving, and very costly to collect.
- 2.5M conversations from GPT-4o.
Links:
- Non-toxic version: https://hf.co/datasets/allenai/WildChat-4.8M
- Full version (gated): https://hf.co/datasets/allenai/WildChat-4.8M-Full
- Exploration tool: https://wildvisualizer.com