It looks like Sam Altman and Jony Ive find it difficult to make an AI device … anything

Killing the smartphone is not easy business; Just ask Sam Altman and Jony Ive. In May, the CEO of Openai and former Apple chief designer announced that they would make a real and tangible gadget that you could possibly hold with your (probably) real and not cats – and not just any gadget. As part of a new company called IO, the two make a gadget ai. Gadget, in the estimate of the duo, is a movement beyond Screens and a revolutionary “third nucleus” device. It is also, according to a new report, not so well.

According to the Financial Times, the two technological heavyweights work on “a device the size of a palm without screen which can take audio and visual clues of the physical environment and respond to user demands”. It is also “designed to sit on a desk or a table”, although it is also portable. They also “still solve critical problems that could delay the release of the aircraft”. What are these critical problems, do you ask? Well, you know, just basic things like getting the device to listen to and also get the calculation power to make the device … works.

Citing an anonymous person familiar with events in IO: “Amazon has the calculation for an Alexa, the same goes for Google (for his domestic apparatus), but Openai has trouble obtaining enough calculation for chatgpt, not to mention an AI device – they must resolve this first.”

I am not an AI genius, but it seems to me to have a computer inside the computer would be a good start. I write “a good start” here, because apparently, even if this thing has a brain, his “personality” was not particularly conducive to the death of your smartphone. In this apparent question of “personality”, there are in fact several problems, so let’s start from above; According to the Financial Times, the IO device has a camera and microphones and is Always listen. It is also – if it did not trigger enough alarms – pochable and capable of being transported with you wherever you go and, I suppose, record everyone / everything you meet.

It is obviously a nightmare of confidentiality, in particular the general management of OPENAI of digital user information. Beyond that, it is also a huge challenge from the point of view of the design., The IO device is designed to listen to all the time and respond if necessary, but the company has trouble code the device in such a way it responds when you wish and stops when you don’t. And you thought Google Home was bad.

Thus, to summarize: Altman and IVE have difficulty fueling the device, making it useful and are (by design) of the potential confidentiality mine. Do you have all that? Oh, and to make things even more busy, the state of AI gadgets is undoubtedly more ruffled than ever. Humane, the company that made this Buggy and too expensive spike that did not do half what the company has promised, was stripped for the parts and sold to HP of all the companies, so it is a big name.

Humane’s brother-in-law, Rabbit, is not much better. The company recently revealed Rabbitos 2, which looks very hard in the idea of ​​atmosphere coding your own applications and finally simplifies the R1 user interface to make it more tactile as a smartphone. The question of whether this counts is another question. It has been almost 1.5 years since the R1 has been released, and it is crawling on the support of life since its very slow start.

Obviously, none of these societies is as deepened and splashing as IO, but I am not sure that the problem, at this stage, is really one of the resources. Regarding AI gadgets, there is still a lot to understand, like: how to make them work? Do people even want that? And should we really walk by recording everything we do and say all the time to perpetuity? And yes, money (engineering and R&D) can resolve part of this, but it cannot buy a market for something that people just don’t want to. As it is the way of Silicon Valley, it seems that Altman and Ive could understand this in the most expensive way possible.