The barriers to AI engineering are crumbling fast

Soon enough we'll have AI that is just integrated into the OS.

So individual apps don't need to do anything to have AI.

What does it mean for an app to "have AI"?

If it makes any kind of decision whatsoever (like an "if" statement), slap the word AI on it.

Think of it as another human having access to the keyboard, mouse and the screen buffer.

At a very minimum I'd say they'll have a way to "chat" with the apps to ask questions / do stuff. Either via APIs that the OS calls or integrated in the app via whatever frameworks will rise to handle this. In 5 to 10 years we'll probably see this. At a very minimum searching docs and "guide" the users through the functionality / do it straight up when asked.

Basically what chatgpt did for chatbots, but at app level. There are lots of apps that take a long time to master. But the average joe doesn't need to master them. If I want to lightly edit some photos, I know photoshop can do it, but I have no clue where that specific thing is in the menus, because I haven't used it in 10 years. But it would be cool to type in a chat box "take all the pictures from my sd card, adjust the colors, straighten the ones that need it, and put them in my Pictures folder under "trip to the sea". And then I can go do something else for the 30-60 minutes it would have taken me to google how to do all of that, or script something, etc.

The ideea of an assistant that can work like that isn't that far-fetched today, IMO. The apps need to expose some APIs, and the "os" needs an language -> action model capable enough to handle basic stuff for average joes. I'd bet good money sonnet3.5 + proper APIs + a bit of fine-tuning could do it today for 50%+ of average user cases.