Very lightweight article. Let's consider a different marketing angle:

Scene: Deutsche Telekom boardroom

CEO: we want a way to differentiate our devices

CTO: you mean like back in the 00's when we built our crapplets into the firmware for feature phones using our network, made them non uninstallable and permanent default for common operations?

CEO: yes, exactly! We used to have a Deutsche Telekom web browser, a DT messaging app, DT social media app...

CTO: Customers today wouldn't go for that. They want iPhones and Google play store. Look what happened with Huawei.

CEO: we just need to convince them that they don't need any of that... And make sure that they couldn't install third party stuff after market...

CTO: so a phone with no apps then?

CEO: no, a phone with one app that can do everything, that we control.

CTO: how are we going to sell a phone with a single pre installed app and convince customers that it's better than having an app store? How can we convince them it can do everything?

CEO and CTO together: We call it AI interface!

Deutsche Telekom domestically is a shit fest in all new technologies and in marketing. They only care for shareholders - customer service or data protection or working products are not interesting to them. As a German I've seen enough of their bullshit to avoid anything affiliated with them. Anything.

No thanks. The AI will just track everything you do and sell your predicted behaviour to advertisers, or, have it's own agenda pre loaded by advertisers so it can nudge you into spending at the right places. Do not want.

That's a terrible idea. LLMs are famously unreliable, and honestly point and click is pretty much user-bandwidth-limited already, so there's little room to improve.

They own 51% of T Mobile btw so...

GUIs were invented because they were intuitive and efficient. There's a reason why CLI isn't used for everything. LLMs allow computers to do more with less instructions, but it's still just not as easy to type or speak a command as it is to tap a button.

I hope they go all in on this and lose a metric fuckload of money

A small Kickstarter-funded startup called Rabbit got attention with a similar concept recently, but they are a minnow compared to Deutsche Telekom.

I suspect AI will eventually come to be the predominant OS of all our computing in all our devices. To displace apps, all that is necessary is AIs trained to operate each one. After that, presumably new protocols will enable AI to interact with services and tasks. That's not all people use smartphones for though. How will they get AI to scroll through social media?

There are a lot of incumbents like Google & Facebook relying on us to stay doing things the old way. News like this from Deutsche Telekom must make them nervous.

This sounds like a cool idea in a decade

I could see this being great! In at least several years and possibly a decade or two, when AI is far more reliable than it is now. And when it can run entirely locally on a smartphone without major problems. And when there is sufficient adoption of this approach that the inability to use apps doesn't cause interoperability problems for users.