I’m just going to call it this: We’ll look back on April 2024 as the beginning of a new technological era. I know, it sounds grandiose, but in the next few weeks, a whole new generation of gadgets is coming to market. Humane will launch voice-controlled AI Pin. Rabbit’s artificial intelligence R1 will begin shipping. Brilliant Labs’ AI-powered smart glasses are coming soon. Meta is launching a new feature for its smart glasses that will let Meta’s artificial intelligence see and help you navigate the real world.
More artificial intelligence products will appear in the future, but the artificial intelligence hardware revolution has officially begun. What all these gadgets have in common is that they put artificial intelligence at the forefront of the experience. When you click on an AI Pin to ask a question, play music, or take a photo, Humane runs your query through a series of language models to figure out what you’re asking for and how best to complete it. When you ask your Rabbit R1 or your Meta smart glasses who made that cool mug you’re looking at, it will tell you it’s a Yeti Rambler through a series of image recognition and data processing models. Artificial Intelligence is not an application or a feature; it is what it is all about.
One or more of these devices will likely define the user experience and feature list so thoroughly that this month will feel like the day you got your first flip phone and Back in the day, the iPhone made flip phones look like antiques. But probably not. What’s more likely is that we’ll get a lot of new ideas about how to interact with technology. Together they will show us at least a glimpse of the future.
So far, the main argument against all these AI products is the existence of smartphones. You may ask, why do I need special hardware to access all this stuff? Why can’t I just do it with the phone in my pocket? To which I say, well, you basically can! The ChatGPT app is great, Google’s Gemini is quickly taking over the Android experience, and if I were a betting man, I’d say there’s going to be 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 cell phones, we’ve forgotten how much friction they actually have. 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 it anywhere from one to forty thousand times, switch to another app, and then again and again Repeat over and over again. Smartphones are great because they can hold and access just about everything, but they really aren’t particularly efficient tools. As long as the app store business model remains as it is, they won’t get better.
The Promise of Artificial Intelligence – I want to emphasize this word promise Because everything we’ve seen so far falls far short of that — abstracting away all those steps and all the friction. All you need to do is declare your intention—play music, navigate home, text Anna, tell me what poison ivy looks like—and let the system figure out how to complete it. Your phone contains a lot of content, but it’s not really optimized for any of it. AI-optimized gadgets are easier to access, launch faster, and always remind you of your input.
The promise of AI is to abstract all of these steps and all of the friction.
If it works, we’ll not only get a new set of gadgets, but also a new crop of big companies. Google and Apple have won the smartphone wars, and neither company has been able to break the App Store duopoly over the past decade. Competition in augmented reality, virtual universes, wearables and everything else is largely about trying to carve out new markets. (On the other hand, it’s no coincidence that while many other companies are developing AI products, Google and Apple are rushing to push AI into your phone.) AI may just be another step in the future for those who have lost it. A failed attempt. Smartphone wars. But it may also be the first universal, accessible technology for everyone that actually feels like an upgrade.
Clearly, an AI-first approach also comes with its own set of challenges. Starting with the whole “AI isn’t very good or reliable yet” thing. But even if we get beyond that, all that abstract simplicity can actually become confusing. What if I text Anna from multiple places? What if I listen to podcasts in Pocket Casts, music in Spotify, audiobooks in Audible, and I have accounts with dozens of other music services that I never use? What if the nearest four-star coffee shop is Starbucks, and I hate Starbucks? If I tell my AI device to buy something, what card will it use? Which retailer does it choose? How fast does it ship? Automation requires trust, and we don’t have many reasons to trust AI yet.
So far, the most compelling approach appears to be a hybrid approach. Both Humane and Rabbit build sophisticated web applications through which you can manage all your accounts, payment systems, conversation history, and other preferences. Rabbit allows you to actually teach your device how to do things the way you want. Both have some kind of display — the Humane, the laser projector, the Rabbit, the little screen on the R1 — where you can check the AI’s work or change the way it plans to do something. Meta and Brilliant’s AI glasses try to solve these problems, either guiding you to look at something on your phone or just trying to do everything for everyone. Artificial intelligence can’t do everything yet.
In many ways, it feels like 2004 all over again. I’d be willing to bet that none of these new devices feel like perfectly executed, fully functional products – even the people who make these gadgets don’t think they’ve done their job, no matter how serious their product videos might be . But before the iPhone turned the entire phone market into glass panels, phones had pivoted; they flipped; they were lollipops and clamshells and sliders and everything in between. Now, everyone is looking for the “AI iPhone,” but we’re not going to find it anytime soon. For that matter, we may never get it, because the promise of AI is that it doesn’t need some kind of perfect interface—it doesn’t need any interface at all. What we will get is Razr, Chocolate, Treo, Pearl, N-Gage and AI Sidekick. It’s going to be chaotic, but it’s also going to be great.