“There are some secret form factors that I cannot tell you about,” the Qualcomm CEO said in an interview with Fortune Editor in Chief Alyson Shontell on the Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast. “But I think we’re working with pretty much all of them.”
“Pretty much all of them,” in this case, means the AI companies racing to build the device that replaces the smartphone. OpenAI, Meta, and others that Amon declined to name in an interview from the company’s San Diego headquarters. This device won’t be something you can hold; it’ll be “things you wear”: glasses, jewelry, pins, pendants. And it’ll center on the idea that the center of digital life will no longer be a phone but an autonomous agent.
This to me feels like a rift between the generations. I’m too old to likely ever trust these things to function without concern of what they will do. Folk older than me tend to excessively trust this type of tech and the folk younger than me seem the same. In my mind it creates a break between those in the ecosystem and those that are not. Like how a bunch of places in my town don’t have websites but do have Facebook pages for their business. I don’t have a FB account so it’s a pain for me but no one else seems to mind. It’s kinda weird being the generation that helped usher in the internet and modern connectivity yet being kinda left out of tech ecosystems (by choice or by exclusion).
“You know you’re Generation X when….”
I find it odd that people now reflect fondly back on “old Facebook” when I remember Zuck and his friends going on about how they got hot girls to give them their photos and personal info.
Hopefully the pendulum will swing again; Gen Z doesn’t actually seem very impressed with AI and the digital services economy.