I’ll just call it: we’ll look back on April 2024 as the start of a new technological era. It sounds grandiose, I know, but in the coming weeks, a whole new generation of gadgets is about to hit the market. Humane will launch its voice-activated AI Pin. Rabbit’s AI-powered R1 will begin shipping. Brilliant Labs’ AI-enabled smart glasses are released. And Meta is rolling out a new feature to its smart glasses that lets Meta’s AI see and help you navigate the real world.
There are many more AI gadgets to come, but the AI hardware revolution is officially beginning. What all of these gadgets have in common is that they put artificial intelligence at the forefront of the experience. When you tap your AI pin to ask a question, play music, or take a photo, Humane runs your query through a series of language models to determine what you’re asking and how to best achieve it. When you ask your Rabbit R1 or Meta smart glasses who makes the cool mug you’re looking at, it goes through a series of image recognition and data processing models in order to tell you it’s ‘a Yeti Rambler. AI is not an application or a feature; that’s all.
It’s possible that one or more of these devices define the user experience and feature list so well that this month will feel like the day you bought your first flip phone. And the day the iPhone made that flip phone look like an antique. But probably not. More likely, we’re about to get a lot of new ideas about how you interact with technology. And together they will show us at least a glimpse of the future.
So far, the main argument against all these AI gadgets has been the existence of the smartphone. Why, you might ask, do I need special hardware to access all of this? Why can’t I just do it on the phone in my pocket? To that I say, well, most of you can! The ChatGPT app is awesome, Google’s Gemini is quickly taking over the Android experience, and if I were a betting man I’d say there’s a lot of AI coming to iOS this year.
Smartphones are great! None of these devices will kill or replace your phone, and anyone who says otherwise is lying to you. But after so many years of using our phones, we’ve forgotten how much friction they actually contain. To do almost anything on your phone, you have to take the device out of your pocket, look at it, unlock it, open an app, wait for the app to load, tap between one and 40,000 times, switch to a another application, and repeat again and again. Smartphones are great because they’re able to hold and access virtually anything, but they’re not actually particularly effective tools. And they’re not going to get better, not as long as the App Store’s business model remains as it is.
The promise of AI – and I want to emphasize the word promise because nothing we’ve seen so far comes close to accomplishing that – is about abstracting away all those steps and all that friction. All you have to do is state your intentions – play music, go home, text Anna, tell me what poison ivy looks like – and let the system figure out how to make it happen. Your phone has tons of them, but it’s not really optimized for anything. An AI-optimized gadget can be easier to reach, faster to launch, and alert of your inputs at any time.
The promise of AI is to take away all these steps and all this friction.
If this comes to fruition, we could have not only a new set of gadgets, but also a new set of huge companies. Google and Apple have won the smartphone wars, and no company in the last decade has even managed to shake up this app store duopoly. A lot of the race for augmented reality, the metaverse, wearables, and everything else has been about trying to open up a new market. (On the other hand, it’s no coincidence that while so many other companies are creating AI gadgets, Google and Apple are hastily working to bring AI into your phone.) AI could turn out to be just another attempt by those who have lost power. smartphone wars. But it could also be the first general-purpose technology, for everyone, that actually feels like an upgrade.
Clearly, the AI-driven approach comes with its own set of challenges. Starting with the idea that “AI isn’t very good or reliable yet.” But even once you get past that, all the simplicity by abstraction can actually turn into confusion. What happens if I text Anna in multiple places? What happens if I listen to podcasts in Pocket Casts and music in Spotify and audiobooks in Audible, and I have accounts with a bunch of other music services that I don’t even use Never ? What if the nearest four-star coffee shop is a Starbucks and I hate Starbucks? If I ask my AI device to buy something, what card does it use? Which retailer does he choose? How fast will it ship? Automation requires trust, and we don’t have much reason to trust AI yet.
So far, the most compelling approach appears to be a hybrid approach. Both Humane and Rabbit have created complex web applications through which you can manage all your accounts, payment systems, chat history and other preferences. Rabbit lets you teach your device how to do things the way you want. Both also have some sort of screen – Humane, a laser projector, Rabbit, a small screen on the R1 – where you can check the AI’s work or change how it plans to do something. AI glasses from Meta and Brilliant attempt to solve these problems by either asking you to look at something on your phone or simply not trying to be all things to all people. AI can’t do everything yet.
In many ways, it feels like it’s 2004 all over again. I’d wager that none of these new devices will feel like a perfectly executed, fully featured product – even the people who make these gadgets don’t think they’ve finished the job, no matter how serious their product videos are. could be. But before the iPhone turned the entire cell phone market into panes of glass, phones pivoted; they turned around; it was candy bars and shells and sliders and everything in between. Right now, everyone is looking for the “iPhone of AI,” but we won’t get it anytime soon. Besides, we may never get it, because the promise of AI is that it doesn’t require some type of sophisticated interface – it doesn’t require any interface at all. What we’re going to get instead are the Razr, Chocolate, Treo, Pearl, N-Gage, and Sidekick of AI. It’s going to be chaos, and it’s going to be awesome.