Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Raise $1B to Design the 'iPhone of AI'
Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Raise $1B to Design the 'iPhone of AI'
SoftBank CEO and founder Masayoshi Son allegedly put up $1 billion for the project as well as pitched involvement from Japanese chip maker Arm.
Plan is to reinvent the smartphone with AI, in the same way the touchscreen on the iPhone reinvented the smartphone.
Particularly interesting given ChatGPTs latest move to have voice recognition and an AI voice respond. If you haven't tried it, it's kind of neat. This morning I had a conversation with ChatGPT with my phone in my pocket, all done overy Bluetooth headphones like I was on a call. It was actually a lot more natural then I expected. I wonder what it would look like if that kind of tech was front and center in a smartphone.
I've included a few snippets from the article below, but the TLDR is, big names and big money are behind brainstorming plans to make an AI first centered smartphone, a plan to reinvent the form factor. The article also points to declining smartphone sails as evidence that the public is tired of the same old slab every year, so this could be an interesting time for this to come out.
I guess it's relevant to mention whatever the fuck the Humane AI pin is: The Humane Ai Pin makes its debut on the runway at Paris Fashion Week https://www.theverge.com/2023/9/30/23897065/humane-ai-pin-coperni-paris-fashion-week
From the article: After rumors began to swirl that Apple alum Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman were having collaborative talks on a mysterious piece of AI hardware, it appears that the pair are indeed trying to corner the smartphone market. The two are reportedly discussing a collaboration on a new kind of smartphone device with $1 billion in backing from Masayoshi Son’s Softbank.
...according to the outlet, the duo are looking to create a device that provides a more “natural and intuitive way” to interact with AI. The nascent idea is to take a ground-up approach to redesigning the smartphone in the same way that Ive did with touchscreens so many years ago. One source told the Financial Times that the plan is to make the “iPhone of artificial intelligence.” Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son is also involved in the venture, with the financial holding group putting up a massive $1 billion toward the effort. Son has also reportedly pitched Arm, a chip designer in which SoftBank has a 90% stake, for involvement.
While it’s still not clear what the end goal of the product talks will be (or if anything will come of them at all, really), it does seem like the general public has become fatigued with the same-y rollout of a slightly better smartphone slab year after year. Tech market analysis firm Canalys revealed in a report earlier this month that smartphone sales have experienced a significant decline in North America. The report indicates that iPhone sales have fallen 22% year-over-year, with an expected decline of 12% in 2023. The numbers are pretty staggering, especially fresh off the release of the iPhone 15, and could be an indicator that people are getting fatigued of the hottest new tech gadgets.
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AI has some legitimate applications but I feel like this is like a mirror of the "PUT BLOCKCHAIN IN EVERYTHING" hype
Just be glad they've moved onto a new obsession and that video card prices are finally coming down.
Just wait till you find out how AIs are trained/ran
Here's hoping NVIDIA drops the personal GPU market , and AMD taking the mantle
A list of business fads in the tech world, from what I remember:
- Personal computers
- Multimedia
- Networks: Internet, E-mail, World Wide Web, all the stupid names for it like cyberspace, information superhighway.
- Web 2.0: AJAX and the long tail, user generated content, democratized information exchange and discovery without gatekeepers
- Social Media
- The Cloud
- Mobile Apps
- Blockchain, cryptocurrency, decentralized finance, smart contracts, Web 3.0, NFTs
- VR, AR, XR
- Generative AI, LLMs, GANs, Deep Learning, etc.
It’s a good list but the blockchain line really jumps out at me for being almost 100% hype and based around a largely useless technology. The rest were real advancements that maybe had a ridiculous hype cycle before settling into an unspectacular but useful phase.
Not sure why this got downvoted. It totally tracks. The current VR and AI fads aren't even the first times we've had fads on those subjects. Yes, we will get some new tech of varying utility out of each fad, but the overhype is real.
I think by painting it as a bunch of buzzwords people were reading into the comment as either an endorsement that the items in the list were the same, which isn't what I meant. I'm just trying to give a description of the various buzzwords I remember being thrown around by a combination of scammers, hucksters, cargo cultists simply mimicking the latest trends without understanding them, and actual legitimate business models, without actually giving my views on which ones actually delivered on the hype, which ones overpromised, or which ones totally fizzed out (or are going to).
Not everything needs AI, but some things would definitely be helped by it. I have blind family members and there are a lot of problems that generative AI are solving that I think can help them directly.