I’ll just call it that. We look back on his April 2024 as the beginning of a new technological era. It may sound far-fetched, but a whole new generation of gadgets is set to hit the market in the coming weeks. Humane launches voice-controlled AI Pin. His R1, powered by Rabbit’s AI, begins shipping. Introducing Brilliant Labs’ AI-equipped smart glasses. And Meta is rolling out new features in its smart glasses that allow Meta’s AI to recognize and navigate the real world.
There are many AI gadgets to come, but the AI hardware revolution is officially beginning. What all these gadgets have in common is that they put artificial intelligence at the forefront of the experience. When you tap an AI Pin to ask a question, play music, or take a photo, Humane queries it through a series of language models to understand what you want and the best way to accomplish it. I’ll figure out a way. When you ask Rabbit R1 or Meta smart glasses who makes that cool mug you’re looking at, they’ll ping you through a series of image recognition and data processing models to tell you it’s a Yeti Rambler . AI is not an app or feature. That’s everything.
This month can feel like the day you got your first flip phone, as one or many of these devices thoroughly establishes their user experience and feature list. and The day the iPhone made its flip phone look like an antique. But probably not. Perhaps what we’re going to get from this is a lot of new ideas about how to interact with technology. And together they will give us at least a glimpse of the future.
The main argument against all these AI gadgets so far is the existence of smartphones. Why do I need special hardware to access all this? Why can’t I do it with my phone in my pocket? And I said, “I can do most of it!” Is called. The ChatGPT app is great, Google’s Gemini is rapidly taking over his Android experience, and if I were a betting man I’d tell you there’s going to be a ton of AI coming to his iOS this year.
Smartphones are amazing! None of these devices will break or replace your phone. Anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. But after years of using cell phones, we forget how much friction they actually contain. To do almost anything on your phone, you take it out of your pocket, stare at it, unlock it, open an app, wait for an app to load, tap anywhere from 1 to 40,000 times, switch to another app, Repeat over and over again. Smartphones are great at storing and accessing virtually everything, but they’re not actually particularly efficient tools. And it’s not going to get better as long as the app store business model remains as it is.
The promise of AI — I want to emphasize this word. promise Because nothing we’ve seen so far comes close to achieving this by abstracting all these steps and all friction from existence. All you need to do is declare your intentions, such as play music, go home, text Anna, tell me what poison ivy looks like. and let the system figure out how to do it. Although mobile phones include a large number of features, they are not really optimized for anything. AI-optimized gadgets are easier to access, start faster, and stay informed of your inputs.
The promise of AI is to eliminate all these steps and all friction from existence
If it goes well, we might get not only a new set of gadgets, but also a new set of giants. Google and Apple won the smartphone war, and no company in the past decade came close to overthrowing the app store duopoly. A lot of the competition for augmented reality, the Metaverse, wearables, and everything else was trying to open up new markets. (Conversely, it’s no coincidence that Google and Apple are rushing to put AI into their smartphones while many other companies are developing AI gadgets.) It may turn out to be just a flop by people who have lost their. Smartphone war. But this could also be the first universal, one-size-fits-all technology that actually feels like an upgrade.
Clearly, an AI-first approach comes with its own set of challenges. Let’s start with “AI isn’t very good or reliable yet.” But even beyond that, all the simplicity of abstraction can actually turn into confusion. What if I text Anna in multiple places? I’m listening to podcasts on Pocket Casts, music on Spotify, audiobooks on Audible, and I send an account to another music service that I’ve never used. What if I have? What if the nearest 4-star coffee shop is Starbucks and I hate Starbucks? If I tell an AI device to buy something, which card will it use? Which retailer do you choose? How long does it take to ship? Automation requires trust, and there aren’t many reasons to trust AI yet.
So far, the most attractive approach appears to be a hybrid approach. Both Humane and Rabbit have built complex web apps that allow you to manage all your accounts, payment systems, conversation history, and other settings. With Rabbit, you can actually teach your device how to do whatever you want. Both have some kind of display (Humane’s a laser projector, Rabbit’s a small screen on her R1) that allow you to see what the AI is doing and change the way it plans to do something. Masu. Meta and Brilliant’s AI glasses try to address these issues by not just telling you to look at something on your phone or trying to be everything to everyone. AI can’t do everything yet.
In many ways, it feels like we’re back in 2004 again. I’m sure none of these new devices feel like perfectly executed, fully-featured products. Even the people making these gadgets don’t think their work is done, no matter how serious their product videos are. Might be so. But before the iPhone glassed out the entire cell phone market, phones took a turn. They flipped out. It was candy bars, clamshells, sliders, and everything in between. Everyone is searching for “AI iPhone” right now, but you won’t find it right away. Because the promise of AI is that we don’t need some kind of perfected interface, we don’t need an interface at all. What we’re getting instead is Razr, Chocolate, Treo, Pearl, N-Gage, and an AI sidekick. It’s going to be a mess, and it’s going to be great.