TACKLING TASKS ONE-BY-ONE
There were perhaps some lessons for the future of such devices from the gathering in Taiwan. During his keynote speech, Qualcomm Chief Executive Officer Cristiano Amon said that AI computers are at the phase where they will require the work of outside developers to make them appeal to consumers.
The iPhone, for example, didn’t take off immediately after it was launched. But it became essential to so many people because of the myriad apps developers built on top of it that we now use to hail taxis, order food or move around new cities. “Really, the developer ecosystem is going to make this shift to AI PCs,” Amon said.
He’s right, and the same is true beyond just AI computers.
For any revolutionary AI hardware device, and especially a smartphone killer, the more that global developers lead the charge to meet peoples’ needs and solve small, everyday problems, the more likely they are to succeed.
In this economy, maybe that doesn’t mean repackaging the same old gadgets with shiny new AI labels. It means iterating and perfecting real use cases that incorporate the buzzy technology into devices and make our lives easier. And this will inevitably be a collective effort.
AI is already transforming our world in small ways. I find asking ChatGPT to quickly translate phrases for me while on the go a lifesaver when navigating a new country. But I hardly want to shell out money to carry around a new device simply to access ChatGPT.
The more the tech industry tries to slap AI onto everything and market it as a panacea for all our problems, the more I get a snake-oil salesman ick.
The future of AI hardware won’t come in a magical new gadget, it will be built by tackling these tasks one-by-one and not all at once.
