Amazon, Google, and Apple are already entrenched in the space. It's not like any of them have toxic brands like Oracle where everyone is dying to free themselves. Most people are happy with their products.
This seems like a tough move...
On another note, I am continuously flabbergasted that even Google cannot get an agentic LLM assistant right. I used to use the Google Assistant ALL the time when it did not make use of LLM's. It was AMAZING. I could just say "wake me up at 7" and it would understand that I meant 7AM the next day, or call "mom", or "set a timer for 10 minutes" while I'm cooking. It was genuinely useful to me.
Google Assistant last week sent me to the Google Search page with my prompt "wake me up at 7am", and Gemini read out loud "setting an alarm for 7am tomorrow morning". But it was bullshit, it doesn't have the power to set alarms, it was just gaslighting me.
The Gemini on my Google Home has the ability to set alarms. Maybe it's a permissions issue on your device.
The irony of selling an AI assistant with that premise is not lost on me
In the US roughly half of teens said they were online “almost constantly"
Just look around kids 8-20 are basically: Fortnite + Roblox + TikTok + YouTube + Netflix + phone all day
Whether that’s a viable product I don’t know.
Oh, you thought you bought the device! Silly peasant! you just have the privilege of paying me to rent the device from me. Remember you will own nothing and will be happy.
Given the almost universal negative press about Altman, I wonder how many people would actually want a device from Sam 'let me scan your eyeballs for make believe money' Altman in their home.
Apple sues OpenAI, accuses ex-employees of stealing trade secrets
So if there was a way to enable the productivity (or even multiply it, let’s be real) without the doomscrolling, a lot of people would go for that.
Not to mention the endless fiddling we’ve had to resort to with phones. We’ve gotten used to it, but apps for everything is such a cognitive burden on people. A screen-less AI assistant is the perfect solution for this. I can’t wait.
Voice is almost always the worst, most frustrating interface.
It's far more useful than the previous Google Assistant answers which were always of the form, "According to petmd.com - [direct quote]".
And that's why this (and any other stand alone "AI device") is doomed to fail.
We solved this problem already in 2007. "An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator. Are you getting it? These are not three separate devices."
The industry has been chasing that high ever since, failing to stop and consider that maybe the smartphone is effectively peak consumer tech as a delivery vehicle for various services.
OpenAI is just upset that they don't get to own the delivery vehicle, Google and Apple do.
Hopefully they've learned from the mistakes of the Humane AI pin and/or the Rabbit R1.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rabbit_r1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humane_Inc.
EDIT:
From the article "The idea is to make the device easy to carry around the home with one hand".
I don't understand the market target at all for this device. You want the equivalent of the Amazon Echo Dot but you also carry around your house?
Overall, openAI can sit on a mountain of money and bet mobile phones are the final form factor for human/AI interaction, as they have been for human/internet.
Or deploy some of that money and figure out whether that is true.
It’s also about creating an environment for those features to emerge, without being constrained by someone else platform, that could natively embed it at any time, and (probably more important) app marketplaces.
A signal for opportunity is also given by Apple’s inability to give their users Siri and Google sitting on transformers while OpenAI grabs the chatbot marketplace.
Also, anything they build does not cannibalize their other product lines.
There are lots of incentives for them to try out and figure out features on the fly, which arguably also happened with the IPhone (app store).
datadrivenangel•1h ago