By Göte Nyman, Professor, University Of Helsinki, Finland & Antti Saarnio, Co-Founder Jolla, Founder Venho.ai
To the best of our knowledge, Jolla Mind2 is the world’s first AI computer that runs on a specifically designed, native AI Operating System (OS) venho.ai (Venho). How is this AI-OS different from classic operating systems and what is it for? Here, in the first part we explain the purpose and the underlying ‘human’ logic behind Venho. The second part, which will be delivered later, takes lessons from the short history of digital UIs in order to see where the fast AI development is taking the UIs and the operating systems that run with AI.
Order in the AI house!
AI is conquering homes, public offices, educational institutes, firms and even armies. Generative AI is exactly what it is called: it generates massive amounts of data, images, actions, and texts. At the moment, close to 200 million companies in the world use generative AI and in two years there will be hundreds of millions of applications using LLMs. Personal computers and other digital devices will be flooded with AI apps and their innovative variations, either as standalone versions or included as added AI features in the everyday digital tools we use. Standard UI designs are in trouble. AI is offered in the cloud and locally and in any possible combination of these.
The inevitable outcome is, already now, that users need seamless, reliable and secure support and management of their AI use, at work and in private life alike. How to survive and manage this immense tech tsunami? Jolla Mind2’s solution is its operating system Venho, having a privacy-respecting design and strict human control of its core AI-driven functions. It is built to serve and protect the user and to maintain a functional, orderly, and creative AI environment. Its ways to treat memory data differs from traditional operating systems and has taken lessons from the workings of the human memory and attention mechanisms.
Why such a special operating system like Venho?
The traditional definition of an operating system (OS) is that it marries the computer hw and software: it allocates processing resources between applications, prioritizes them, has interfaces for accessing the connected devices and tasks, and it provides resources and data structures for running tasks and applications on different hw.
Each operating system has its own UI ‘layer’ and style that makes the devices usable and inviting for the human user. These systems are designed to support the devices, tools and apps configured in it. The user acts as the driver, manually navigating between apps, searching for files or messages and organizing them, planning and prioritizing tasks, and executing actions like replying to emails or configuring events step by step.The traditional operating systems were not directly built to collaborate with the user in complex everyday jobs, tasks and behaviors.
Venho understands the digital life of the user
The best AI functions and services are those that have contextual sensitivity, work in concert and aware of our life, take into consideration the human limitations and situations, they are well organized and properly offered – and the user has control over their critical functions at any time. This is important also in the possible cases of hallucinations or poor logic by AI so that the user can block, change or prevent them. AI running wild is a nightmare and even uncertainty of what it is doing is disturbing and risky. Venho has been designed with these requirements in mind. How is it different from a standard operating system that we know from Windows, Apple and others?
In Venho UX, the user becomes the decision-maker, with AI acting as an intelligent and contextually aware assistant and memory manager. Repetitive workflows, such as categorizing emails or prioritizing tasks, are handled by AI agents in concert, allowing users to focus on approving decisions and overseeing workflows rather than managing them manually. Its core ‘mission’ is to get the best out of the AI, to protect and support the user when using AI in natural everyday tasks at work, with people and in private life. Locally and globally. It can live with the fast development of LLMs by adopting them as they become available and can be guaranteed as secure tools.
Venho has an innovative memory and attention system. It is designed to function like human memory, enabling users to store and retrieve relevant and meaningful data in an orderly manner. It acts contextually, reducing time spent and the workload in searching for information. Activities under Venho are organized contextually to streamline workflows and minimize distractions, allowing users to concentrate on what truly matters. This minimizes app-switching when AI agents can autonomously manage the workflows related to specific activities. A seamless user experience is created.
As examples, actions are executed through intuitive semantic commands (e.g., “Play my favorite playlist” or “Schedule a meeting”), eliminating the clicking and browsing of dropdown menus or cluttered side panels. This is possible since the app layer of Venho evolves into a protocol layer, removing the need to open apps and manipulate their details altogether. Users interact directly with app functionalities using natural, semantic commands such as “Order a pizza” or “Book a ride.”
With an AI having such a strong capability, it is natural that Venho gives user the critical control. While AI handles emails, messages, and calendar workflows in the background, the users retains full control by approving all final actions, ensuring trust, relevance, and accountability.
Venho collaborates, interacts and works proactively with the AI user. It ‘knows’ where the human user, having her limited cognitive and other human resources, needs support and help. It relieves her from burdensome memory and attention load by monitoring and integrating relevant data from her distributed data bases and digital communication channels. Relying on the knowledge on how the human memory and attention systems work and what are their weaknesses, Venho has been designed to ‘extend’ and boost the user’s personal memory and enhance her focus at work and in any other digital activity. Built on these human requirements Venho has a way to control the AI in the use of devices, tools, services and apps and make them naturally human-oriented.
Memory and “memory” – human inspiration in the design of Venho
The inherent problem of a computer memory is that it is totally different from human memory, almost ‘orthogonal’ to it. Some decades ago, associative memories were expected to help in this. Brain theories are not even close to understanding the real, natural, and complex functioning of the human memory. Artificial neural networks are amazing general-purpose distributed memories, but they lack the systemic ‘human’ structure and many other genuine human features. Hence, they do not fully support contextual and first-person human memory.
Venho takes inspiration from what we know of the strengths and weaknesses of different forms of human memory and attention, like episodic, semantic and procedural memory, to mention a few. Using this as inspiration, the design of Venho guides AI in the user in tasks where such human resources and processes are under stress and need support. This can be compared to what is called biologically inspired neural networks, where the artificial net includes any useful features discovered in real neural systems. Quite similarly, with AI we have a lot to learn about the real functioning of the human mind.
The way Venho uses computer memory differs significantly from standard data base orientated processing. It can take the first-person perspective to the user’s physical data (and even a third person perspective). In this way, retrieval and storage of memory items and ‘chunks’ of information can be made relevant and work in a way that reminds the workings of the human mind. For example, a complex construction or collaboration project generates a pile of agendas, meeting minutes, decision documents, communications, commentaries and other interaction data. These are often shared and distributed in various tools like WhatsApp, Slack, email systems, and specific project and collaboration environments. Over the history they might even get lost in the physical memory jungle.
A project manager, for example, devotes much of his memory and attention capacity to work with this information and learn to use it. However, this can become a significant cognitive load that we active digital workers so well know. Such personal memory knowledge can also become person-dependent and a risk for critical collaboration and problem for a firm when only someone knows “what, where, when, who?” The data may well reside in data systems but the intelligent perspectives to it have special value. Venho improves the digital worker’s efficiency and relieves him from unnecessary memory and attentive load.
Personal perspective to data
Venho observes and manages digital data just like a user would do: from personal or first-person perspective. It knows which documents and interrelated documents and other information entities are relevant for each problem or a question presented to it, and how to retrieve them so that their information is optimally delivered to the user. This ‘perspective knowledge’ is very human-like and relieves the user from burdensome searching, browsing and scanning of relevant physical data structures, while it also makes this memory function person-independent. Interestingly, Venho can take the perspective of the ‘third person’ as well so that it is possible to know how other persons ‘see’ the data, that is, how it looks like to them. This kind of intelligently organized memory data can be easily provided to a newcomer or any other relevant party benefitting from it.
Sometimes the data of interest consists of episodes, that is events (decision making meetings, pitches, informal discussions, even communication conflicts) where the user has been a participant. Some memory data can be outside the user’s presence and activities but still relevant to the problem at hand. Venho retrieves this data as a meaningful episodic entity. The other author (GN) has a history as a psychology professor, with extensive experience in teaching cognitive, brain and perception sciences, and loves to call this memory function of Venho as its own episodic memory since it extends our human episodic memory and works in a manner very similar to its human version. It seems quite evident that this kind of memory will become part of every AI-based memory system since we humans know, by experience, its power. We all remember significant episodes of our life, like the other author (GN) still vividly remembers the moment, (sometimes in the early 1960s) as a teenager when his physics teacher commented his presentation of a physics homework solution at the blackboard: “Nyman, one day you will be a scientist.” It was the school that had the worst reputation in Helsinki.
We have other human memory functions as well, like the procedural memory, for example. Its definition (wiki) is “Procedural memory guides the processes we perform, and most frequently resides below the level of conscious awareness.” As an example, extensive project phases and their procedures can be hard to remember, and to repeat without extra guidance, especially when they span very long periods of time and have multiple components and branches, like in typical construction and collaboration projects. Sometimes they have not been properly documented. Venho serves our procedural memory by retrieving meaningful, integrated entities with a procedural perspective so that they are easy to find and access. In the second part we will explain them and their meaning for UI design in AI environments.
Jolla Mind2 and Venho take a human perspective to data
Below are a few examples (there are more, and other similar ‘human’ features are in the pipeline) of these cognitively guided designs in Venho and how they live in the Jolla Mind2 functions:
- Integrated email processing that relieves the user from continuous monitoring and scanning of the messages coming from different digital channels.
- Automatic classification and summaries of the channel messages according to their content and significance for the user.
- Maintaining focus by intelligent filtering and prioritizing the inputs to user.
- Building and maintaining a trusted personal data base for AI use and chat interaction.
- Content-based, dynamic contact management to alert the user and keep him aware of significant events and relevant activities in her network of contacts.
- Contextual and episodic retrieval and organized integration of data from significant events and data sources.
Human in control at every significant phase of AI actions.
Even with the most advanced AI, the essence of it is and will be meaningful collaboration with people and communities. Venho is designed to support this.
Elinor Ostrom, the famous Nobel Laureate (economics) became famous for her work on how communities can intelligently handle their commons (water resources, fields, forests), better than anyone of the community members could do alone. The secret to this was continuous interaction and feed-back at all levels of collaboration and decision making, and the adoption of useful heuristics to guide people’s behavior. These guidelines are now valuable and even critical in many uses of AI, especially when it involves complex and risky decision making, extensive collaboration, control of AI activities, and in critical tasks.
With AI, even with the imaginary AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), such (cultural, local, practical, experience-based) heuristics are of significant value when relevant, intelligent thinking is difficult or not possible. Venho relies on interaction between the user and the AI by giving the user and the community control over significant operations.
On the future of UIs in AI environments
After a decade of standstill, UIs are now entering a new evolutional phase (introduction of chats, NLP, gesture use, task representations, visualization, AI interaction, AR, XR etc) and we can see them in the familiar AI applications like those from Apple, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI, for example. However, the new features still reflect the recent past and there are no strong standards as of yet, although de facto standards will probably emerge simply because of the masses of users adopting them.
Where are the UIs of intelligent systems going – lessons from history
It is evitable that the nature of digital UI, UX and other human connections with the AI will change profoundly. There are several reasons to this:
With AI the user can engage in his natural tasks where the ‘interface’ reminds more of a connection we have as humans between each other or with nature and any natural object of activity.
Because of the learning and adaptation ability of the AI, the user is relived from giving detailed instructions and managing the actions of the apps and services used.
AI can be an active interface that guides the behavior of the user and even her community.
User behavior data (like the Internet of Behaviors, IoB) become a significant source of knowledge for the AI which can then approach and help us when it is relevant and not to disturb us.
We will return to these later and look at Jolla Mind2 and Venho, the future of UIs and lessons learned from the short digital history. A big question is the future of ethics with AI.
Distributed development, adoption and the social risks of AI
AI application tools enter all sectors of life and centralized development and control of the AI market introduces new risks, many of them not visible as of yet. As Antti Saarnio from Jolla has recently warned, we can already see signs of how the power obtained by the dominant AI players can form a major risk factor for democratic development in societies. It is a question of how AI will be developed, marketed, and distributed and whether it will be centralized, distributed, or regulated in nature – or any combination of these.
We can observe how the advanced and speculated future AI secures huge capital and even political power to the few. EU has introduced its first regulations and some countries follow, but many don’t. Ideological drivers have already taken a grip of the global AI industry. China, U.S, EU, and Russia do not play the same game. There is surprisingly little discussion on how AI innovations, especially human-orientated ones could help minimize or even prevent such risks. Venho represents one candidate approach and an example of this.
There is no time to waste. The social impact of AI is increasing exponentially: it is improving in ever demanding and higher-order content understanding and invites massive participation of specialists to build their own AI tools, environments and solutions. A new strategic question emerges, what it means that extensive special expertise will be available everywhere from AI: “Strategy in an Era of Abundant Expertise”.
Novel and intelligent AI applications can be expected from professionals in all sectors of life and businesses. They need well-founded support and also AI operating systems that make adoption, use, sharing and development of the AI tools healthy, safe and feasible. It seems plausible that operating systems like Venho will find a significant role in securing privacy, the autonomy of AI use, and the possibility to build new AI tools and applications in a distributed and fair manner, independent of the AI giants. Prepared to this, Venho includes templates to be used for different contents and purposes, and to scale up AI use. It is hoped that interested parties find it effective and easy to develop their own applications and even templates that can be massively distributed, shared and commercialized. We expect this to speed up AI adoption in all sectors of industry, public and private services and businesses.
