alt Hacker News> And yet having an agent able yo use a computer on your behalf is really useful.
I honestly cannot think of a single use case
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I think the main advantage is adaptability.
Imagine you have a pretty exotic task you need to complete that involves converting a video file from one format to another.
You can use ChatGPT or something similar and the best you will get is either a script you can run on you machine that does what you need or he may decide to render a new video.
If you have something like OpenwebUI you could configure a MCP that converts videos and allow the model to use this MCP to do your task. This should work, but is quite a lot of work for something you'll ever do once.
But if the agent has it's own environment he can decide to install ffmpg, execute the transformation and serve you the file you want.
In reality there is no new capabilities with this approach, but things get a lot more comfortable.
I give you one: Google news is pretty terrible right now almost all interesting new sources are paywalls and so I get recommended all kind of weird lifestyle publications that are really horrible. With the computer use API I can just tell. Tell Gemini to look at Google news pick the articles that look interesting. Look them up on archive.is, and just give me the plain text article and construct a summary - I think that would probably work pretty well.
Literally everything you do every day.
It's the end game of AI. Have systems trained on doing EVERYTHING you do on a computer all day. Trained by you while doing the job.