What would a consumer product centered around AI look like?

I have been working in the smartphone / Consumer Tech space for over 12+ years, and I have been thinking, with all the AI news and buzz, what will replace our smartphones? What’s the next big tech innovation in consumer tech?

OpenAI and Jony Ive are in talks to raise $1bn from SoftBank to create the ‘iPhone of artificial intelligence’. And today, Google launched Pixel 8 and 8 Pro and spoke about Bard integrations into Google apps and services. As we approach 1st Anniversary of ChatGPT3, will AI replace our smartphones or complement it? Do you want an AI iPhone?

I feel nothing will replace smartphones for at least 2 decades; we will witness AI complimenting Smartphones. Google, at its launch, spoke about how AI can be smartly integrated into Hardware to make our devices smarter and impact our lives for the better. Before the iPhone, smartphones were text; now, we can browse the internet and use apps and services. With AI, LLM, and AI chips, we will not need the wall of apps on our smartphones, but developers can stream services via LLMs. LLMs can be an operating system, computing through the instream utility in Chat or LLM interface.

Imagine having not to open any app but use voice or chat to place orders or commands — Call me uber, order me food, check for my flight status, web check-in, and the in-stream AI model does the task for you and presents the result. With time, mobile Hardware will have powerful processors and human computation integration will change, LLMs not as a chatbot but as the kernel process of a new Operating System in smartphones/ smart devices:

- Input and output across modalities (text, audio, vision)

- Code interpreter, ability to write & and run programs

- Browser/internet access

- Embeddings database for files and internal memory storage & and retrieval

Today’s ‘Made By Google’ event confirmed a few things:

- Google is very much a software-led business, and its capabilities around generative AI are impressive.

- Their Tensor G3 chip does amazing on-device things without going to the cloud.

- Anyone who has written off Google as a laggard in the AI space needs to take a second-long look at everything they are doing.

- I have serious questions about Apple’s capabilities in using and deploying AI capabilities across their offerings.

- The AI wars have not even started in big tech and whatever we see at the moment is simply the start of a long drawn-out battle for early mover advantage.

- Bard can now connect to your Google Apps and Services

- Assistant with a bard is game-changing

- Tensor G3 is our third-generation chip powering Pixel8 and 8 Pro to bring the latest in Google AI to Pixel directly.

- Amazing AI Photo editing baked right into the chipset.

- A.I. is really being utilized with Android vs iPhone. IPhone 50% relies on Google — YouTube, G Drive, Chrome, Maps & on many server-based apps.

- Generative AI can run on our phones, bringing personalization and improved experience.

- With on-device generative AI we can achieve a lot of efficiency and productivity eg: while we take calls or join meetings over the phone, the LLM can summarize calls, take meeting minutes, can do smart replies, and do impressive Photo & video edits.

We aren’t yet at the point where smartphone technology can anticipate requests instead of responding to them, but we’re getting close. Smartphones can recognize images, voices and languages, and process them as data — these devices can, at least in theory, make decisions and optimize performance based on what they’ve learned from our usage. These features are complemented by the ability to use algorithms/machine learning to understand the surrounding environment through the cameras better, autonomously adjust light, colors, and exposure times, and take photos of almost professional standards.

The AI-driven photo features such as magic eraser and the facial expression editor are really pushing the boundary of reality. It makes me wonder what differentiates a picture from art if we can move things around and change people’s expressions to our liking. AI companies describe a future with AI systems as “all-powerful, life-fixing ‘genies’” — I feel it can bring unlimited possibilities when paired with smart devices.