u/Mathos6

Just recently, I started a new project alongside my studies. Here at school, we plug USB drives in and out all the time and... there's a little virus going around.

So I came up with a simple idea: sandbox the USB drive and only retrieve the files you actually want from it.

That's how I started coding Quartzine, a sandbox for USB drives. You plug in the USB drive, Quartzine detects it, creates a virtual machine, passes the USB through to the VM, you do your stuff and... that's all I originally had in mind.

Nevertheless, since I'm not really someone who focuses on the present, I decided to go further: Integrate malware analysis into it using eBPF (through bpftrace).

That led me to learning bpftrace, and I'm still doing that haha.

If you want to take a look, here's where the code lives:

https://github.com/Mathos6/Quartzine (The project isn't fully functional yet, but I think it'll be by the end of the summer.)

I'd love to hear what you think about it, things I could improve, things I should rethink, etc.

At first, the technology itself is the product.

"We're an electricity company."

"We're an internet company."

**"We're an AI company."**

Then the technology becomes infrastructure. Nobody talks about it anymore because it's assumed.

Imagine pitching YouTube in 2026:

*"We're a company that uses the internet to transmit videos."*

That sounds ridiculous now. The internet is just the plumbing. The same thing may happen with AI.

Today founders say:

*"We're building an AI startup." ||*

*"AI coding assistant." ||*

*"AI customer support."*

Ten years from now, people might simply say:

"We're building smart glasses." ||

"We're building a tutoring platform." ||

"We're building a design tool.".

What's interesting is that we're already seeing early signs of this. Take OpenAI, Google, or Meta. They're all racing toward products where AI disappears into the experience: Smart glasses that understand context, search engines that answer instead of linking and operating systems that automate tasks.

AI is just the mechanism.

A useful historical analogy is the internet itself. In the late 1990s, saying "internet company" actually conveyed meaningful information because the technology was new and scarce. Today, if someone says *"I'm founding an internet company,"* you immediately wonder: What kind? E-commerce? Social media? SaaS? Gaming? The word is too broad to be useful.

I suspect "AI startup" will eventually sound equally vague.

An investor in 2035 might hear:

*"We're an AI company."*

and respond:

*"Okay... and what do you actually do?"*

The companies that survive may not be the ones that market themselves as AI companies. They may be the ones that solve a specific problem better than everyone else because AI is woven into the product so deeply that users stop noticing it.

My 1st personal project

My thoughts on the future of AI