Goodbye to the smartphone? The promise of the AI ​​device that will replace it and do everything for us

AI Pin was presented at the end of 2023 as a device that clips to clothing, without a screen and powered by AI with which the Humane company sought to replace mobile phones in day-to-day communication and task management.

Equipped with a camera, a speaker and different sensors, It offered interaction through voice, touch, gestures or through a laser screen with 720p resolution that was projected on the palm of the hand to respond to the user’s requests.

This device did not convince consumers, who complained that it offered slow responses, the information was not reliable and its battery did not have the expected autonomy, and after the acquisition of Humane by HP, it stopped working in February of this year.

In 2024, Rabbit r1 was also released, a pocket device powered by generative AI that worked as an assistant and unified the different applications installed on the smartphone into a single interface to manage and use them through voice commands.

Its objective, more than replacing the ‘smartphone’, was to simplify its use, so that the user could access the services they had without having to switch between the different interfaces of their applications or navigate between several open windows.

However, the future does not seem to want mobile phones, and the AI ​​Pin proposal is still alive thanks to technology companies like Nothing and OpenAI. The first is already moving towards the construction of a native AI platform with which it aims to replace the smartphone as a reference device in people’s lives.

As explained by Nothing’s co-founder and CEO, Carl Pei, in September, when he unveiled this project, it requires the reinvention of consumer hardware and an operating system that “will deeply know its user and will be fully personalized for each person.”

For its development, Nothing announced a Series C financing round of 200 million dollars, reaching a valuation of 1,300 million dollars (about 1,099 million euros).

OpenAI, for its part, acquired the company io in May, co-founded by Jonathan Ive, former head of Design at Apple, with the aim of establishing a team dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence ‘hardware’.

At the moment, they have only confirmed that they are working on a device, which will not be a ‘wearable’ (a smart bracelet or watch) or headphones, although various leaks have anticipated that it is a device similar to a smart speaker without a screen.

Its development is progressing and they even hope to have it ready in less than two years, and this despite the challenges that arise with its development, which include the ‘software’, the infrastructure that will support it and the computing capacity, as well as issues related to the AI ​​assistant, its personality, privacy and the budget of the computing power that will be needed to execute the language models.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has explained that they hope to build a device that, in addition to doing things for users, is contextually aware of when it should bother them and when it should present them with information or ask for their opinion or not.

Currently, they are working on the first prototypes of their device, after discarding a previous design that they were not enthusiastic about.