“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.
Nobody has released a single piece of AI specific hardware that has an answer to the question “What problem does this solve that a phone couldn’t do?”
I struggle to even imagine what that device would do. They talk about essentially adding sensors to the AI’s perception around you and doing stuff for you. What daily problems do people have that AI can help? As far as I’m aware most people use AI as a glorified search engine.
Ignoring the privacy concerns there, this device just sounds like an extension to your current smartphone, which is in no way a groundbreaking product. The only way it ends the smartphone centric world is if this new form factor also replaced content consumption, which would just be AR glasses, and we are quite a way from technology making those feasible for replacing a smartphone and being usable for a full day.
the hardware, I’ve heard many speculate, is for collecting data needed to power embodied AI (actual robots).
so far, US-based “AI” has focused largely on LLMs and disembodied “intelligence”. this is just interacting with screens. but getting their proprietary AI models into a real body that moves in the real world (using motors, balance, gyroscopes, accelerometers) will require a ton of training data.
might be bullshit. who knows. either way the goals of AI companies is all the same imo: create perfect slaves to replace workers.
I’ve always felt that AI was a solution looking for a problem.