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Making these tools work together will be key to this concept taking off, says Leo Gebbie, an analyst who covers connected devices at CCS Insight. Rather than having that sort of disjointed experience where certain apps are using AI in certain ways, you want AI to be that overarching tool that when you want to pull up anything from any app, any experience, any content, you have the immediate ability to search across all of those things.

When the pieces slot together, the idea sounds like a dream. Imagine being able to ask your digital assistant, Hey who was that bloke I talked to last week who had the really good ramen recipe? and then have it spit up a name, a recap of the conversation, and a place to find all the ingredients.

For people like me who don't remember anything and have to write everything down, this is going to be great, Moorhead says.

And theres also the delicate matter of keeping all that personal information private.

If you think about it for a half second, the most important hard problem isn't recording or transcribing, it's solving the privacy problem, Gruber says. If we start getting memory apps or recall apps or whatever, then we're going to need this idea of consent more broadly understood.

Despite his own enthusiasm for the idea of personal assistants, Gruber says there's a risk of people being a little too willing to let their AI assistant help with (and monitor) everything. He advocates for encrypted, private services that aren't linked to a cloud serviceor if they are, one that is only accessible with an encryption key that's held on a users device. The risk, Gruber says, is a sort of Facebook-ification of AI assistants, where users are lured in by the ease of use, but remain largely unaware of the privacy consequences until later.

Consumers should be told to bristle, Gruber says. They should be told to be very, very suspicious of things that look like this already, and feel the creep factor.

Your phone is already siphoning all the data it can get from you, from your location to your grocery shopping habits to which Instagram accounts you double-tap the most. Not to mention that historically, people have tended to prioritize convenience over security when embracing new technologies.

The hurdles and barriers here are probably a lot lower than people think they are, Gebbie says. Weve seen the speed at which people will adopt and embrace technology that will make their lives easier.

Thats because theres a real potential upside here too. Getting to actually interact with and benefit from all that collected info could even take some of the sting out of years of snooping by app and device makers.

If your phone is already taking this data, and currently its all just being harvested and used to ultimately serve you ads, is it beneficial that youd actually get an element of usefulness back from this? Gebbie says. Youre also going to get the ability to tap into that data and get those useful metrics. Maybe thats going to be a genuinely useful thing.

Thats sort of like being handed an umbrella after someone just stole all your clothes, but if companies can stick the landing and make these AI assistants work, then the conversation around data collection may bend more toward how to do it responsibly andin a way that provides real utility.

It's not a perfectly rosy future, because we still have to trust the companies that ultimately decide what parts of our digitally collated lives seem relevant. Memory may be a fundamental part of cognition, but the next step beyond that is intentionality. Its one thing for AI to remember everything we do, but another for it to decide which information is important to us later.

We can get so much power, so much benefit from a personal AI, Gruber says. But, he cautions, the upside is so huge that it should be morally compelling that we get the right one, that we get one that's privacy protected and secure and done right. Please, this is our shot at it. If it's just done the free, not private way, we're going to lose the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to do this the right way.

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Humans Forget. AI Assistants Will Remember Everything - WIRED

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From boom to burst, the AI bubble is only heading in one direction  The Guardian

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From boom to burst, the AI bubble is only heading in one direction - The Guardian

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Google goes all in on generative AI at Google Cloud Next  TechCrunch

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Google goes all in on generative AI at Google Cloud Next - TechCrunch

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Hardware is emerging as a key AI growth area. For Big Tech companies with the money and talent to do so, developing in-house chips helps reduce dependence on outside designers such as Nvidia and Intel while also allowing firms to tailor their hardware specifically to their own AI models, boosting performance and saving on energy costs.

These in-house AI chips that Google and Meta just announced pose one of the first real challenges to Nvidias dominant position in the AI hardware market. Nvidia controls more than 90% of the AI chips market, and demand for its industry-leading semiconductors is only increasing. But if Nvidias biggest customers start making their own chips instead, its soaring share price, up 87% since the start of the year, could suffer.

From Metas point of view it gives them a bargaining tool with Nvidia, Edward Wilford, an analyst at tech consultancy Omdia, told Fortune. It lets Nvidia know that theyre not exclusive, [and] that they have other options. Its hardware optimized for the AI that they are developing.

Why does AI need new chips?

AI models require massive amounts of computing power because of the huge amount of data required to train the large language models behind them. Conventional computer chips simply arent capable of processing the trillions of data points AI models are built upon, which has spawned a market for AI-specific computer chips, often called cutting-edge chips because theyre the most powerful devices on the market.

Semiconductor giant Nvidia has dominated this nascent market: The wait list for Nvidias $30,000 flagship AI chip is months long, and demand has pushed the firms share price up almost 90% in the past six months.

And rival chipmaker Intel is fighting to stay competitive. It just released its Gaudi 3 AI chip to compete directly with Nvidia. AI developersfrom Google and Microsoft down to small startupsare all competing for scarce AI chips, limited by manufacturing capacity.

Why are tech companies starting to make their own chips?

Both Nvidia and Intel can produce only a limited number of chips because they and the rest of the industry rely on Taiwanese manufacturer TSMC to actually assemble their chip designs. With only one manufacturer solidly in the game, the manufacturing lead time for these cutting-edge chips is multiple months. Thats a key factor that led major players in the AI space, such as Google and Meta, to resort to designing their own chips. Alvin Nguyen, a senior analyst at consulting firm Forrester, told Fortune that chips designed by the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon wont be as powerful as Nvidias top-of-the-line offeringsbut that could benefit the companies in terms of speed. Theyll be able to produce them on less specialized assembly lines with shorter wait times, he said.

If you have something thats 10% less powerful but you can get it now, Im buying that every day, Nguyen said.

Even if the native AI chips Meta and Google are developing are less powerful than Nvidias cutting-edge AI chips, they could be better tailored to the companys specific AI platforms. Nguyen said that in-house chips designed for a companys own AI platform could be more efficient and save on costs by eliminating unnecessary functions.

Its like buying a car. Okay, you need an automatic transmission. But do you need the leather seats, or the heated massage seats? Nguyen said.

The benefit for us is that we can build a chip that can handle our specific workloads more efficiently, Melanie Roe, a Meta spokesperson, wrote in an email to Fortune.

Nvidias top-of-the-line chips sell for about $25,000 apiece. Theyre extremely powerful tools, and theyre designed to be good at a wide range of applications, from training AI chatbots to generating images to developing recommendation algorithms such as the ones on TikTok and Instagram. That means a slightly less powerful, but more tailored chip could be a better fit for a company such as Meta, for examplewhich has invested in AI primarily for its recommendation algorithms, not consumer-facing chatbots.

The Nvidia GPUs are excellent in AI data centers, but they are general purpose, Brian Colello, equity research lead at Morningstar, told Fortune. There are likely certain workloads and certain models where a custom chip might be even better.

The trillion-dollar question

Nguyen said that more specialized in-house chips could have added benefits by virtue of their ability to integrate into existing data centers. Nvidia chips consume a lot of power, and they give off a lot of heat and noiseso much so that tech companies may be forced to redesign or move their data centers to integrate soundproofing and liquid cooling. Less powerful native chips, which consume less energy and release less heat, could solve that problem.

AI chips developed by Meta and Google are long-term bets. Nguyen estimated that these chips took roughly a year and a half to develop, and itll likely be months before theyre implemented at a large scale. For the foreseeable future, the entire AI world will continue to depend heavily on Nvidia (and, to a lesser extent, Intel) for its computing hardware needs. Indeed, Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta was on track to own 350,000 Nvidia chips by the end of this year (the companys set to spend around $18 billion on chips by then). But movement away from outsourcing computing power and toward native chip design could loosen Nvidias chokehold on the market.

The trillion-dollar question for Nvidias valuation is the threat of these in-house chips, Colello said. If these in-house chips significantly reduce the reliance on Nvidia, theres probably downside to Nvidias stock from here. This development is not surprising, but the execution of it over the next few years is the key valuation question in our mind.

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Meta and Google announce new in-house AI chips, creating a trillion-dollar question for Nvidia - Fortune

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The idea behind the Humane AI Pin is a simple one: its a phone without a screen. Instead of asking you to open apps and tap on a keyboard, this little wearable abstracts everything away behind an AI assistant and an operating system Humane calls CosmOS. Want to make a phone call, send a text message, calculate the tip, write something down, or learn the population of Copenhagen? Just ask the AI Pin. It uses a cellular connection (only through T-Mobile and, annoyingly, not connected to your existing number) to be online all the time and a network of AI models to try to answer your questions and execute your commands. Its not just an app; its all the apps.

Humane has spent the last year making the case that the AI Pin is the beginning of a post-smartphone future in which we spend less time with our heads and minds buried in the screens of our phones and more time back in the real world. How that might work, whether thats something we want, and whether its even possible feel like fundamental questions for the future of our relationship with technology.

I came into this review with two big questions about the AI Pin. The first is the big-picture one: is this thing anything? In just shy of two weeks of testing, Ive come to realize that there are, in fact, a lot of things for which my phone actually sucks. Often, all I want to do is check the time or write something down or text my wife, and I end up sucked in by TikTok or my email or whatever unwanted notification is sitting there on my screen. Plus, have you ever thought about how often your hands are occupied with groceries / clothes / leashes / children / steering wheels, and how annoying / unsafe it is to try to balance your phone at the same time? Ive learned I do lots of things on my phone that I might like to do somewhere else. So, yeah, this is something. Maybe something big. AI models arent good enough to handle everything yet, but Ive seen enough glimmers of whats coming that Im optimistic about the future.

That raises the second question: should you buy this thing? That ones easy. Nope. Nuh-uh. No way. The AI Pin is an interesting idea that is so thoroughly unfinished and so totally broken in so many unacceptable ways that I cant think of anyone to whom Id recommend spending the $699 for the device and the $24 monthly subscription.

AI Pin and its AI OS, Cosmos, are about beginning the story of ambient computing, Humanes co-founders, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, told me in a statement after I described some of the issues Ive had with the AI Pin. Today marks not the first chapter, but the first page. We have an ambitious roadmap with software refinements, new features, additional partnerships, and our SDK. All of this will enable your AI Pin to become smarter and more powerful over time. Our vision is for Cosmos to eventually exist in many different devices and form factors, to unlock new ways to interact with all of your devices.

As the overall state of AI improves, the AI Pin will probably get better, and Im bullish on AIs long-term ability to do a lot of fiddly things on our behalf. But there are too many basic things it cant do, too many things it doesnt do well enough, and too many things it does well but only sometimes that Im hard-pressed to name a single thing its genuinely good at. None of this not the hardware, not the software, not even GPT-4 is ready yet.

Well-made device

Photos look pretty good

Much easier to access than your phone

Just doesnt work half the time

Really slow even when it does work

Missing way too many basic things

As a piece of gear, the AI Pin is actually pretty impressive. Its smaller than you might think: roughly the size of four quarters laid in a square, or half the size of a pack of Orbit gum. Its not heavy (about 55 grams, according to my scale roughly the same as two AA batteries or the key fob to my car), but its definitely solid, made of aluminum and designed to survive falls or even the occasional trip through the washing machine. My review unit is white, but the AI Pin also comes in black. Both look and feel much better than your average first-gen hardware product.

The bar here is high, though, because of how youre meant to use the AI Pin. In all of Humanes demos and marketing, the AI Pin sits in the same place: on the right or left side of your chest, right below your collarbone, attached via a magnet that also acts as a battery booster. Its a pin on a lapel. (Its a little fiddly to get situated, but the magnet does hold through all but the thickest of clothes.) You dont have to use it this way you can hold it in your hand or even talk to it while its in its desk charger but the AI Pins built-in microphones are designed to hear you best from that angle; the slightly downward-facing camera sees best from there, and the upward-firing speakers work best in that spot.

The AI Pin is also just incredibly unsubtle. When you stand in front of a building, tapping your chest and nattering away to yourself, people will notice. And everything gets in the way, too. My backpack straps rubbed against it, and my messenger bag went right over it. Both my son and my dog have accidentally set the AI Pin off while climbing on top of me. If you buy this thing, I recommend also buying the $50 clip that makes it easier to attach to a waistband or a bag strap, where I actually prefer to keep it.

The upside of sticking it on your chest is that you can reach it with either hand (I call the moves The Pledge of Allegiance and The Backpack Strap Grab),and even a spare pinkie is enough to wake it up. Anytime you want to talk to the AI Pin, you press and hold on its front touchpad its not listening for a wake word and speak your questions or commands. Practically anything the AI Pin can do, you can ask for. It can answer basic ChatGPT-style questions, make phone calls, snap photos, send text messages, tell you whats nearby, and more. You can also do a few things just by tapping the touchpad, like keyboard shortcuts on a computer: double-tap with two fingers to take a photo; double-tap and hold with two fingers to take a video.

Having the thing right there did make me use it more, sometimes for things I wouldnt have bothered to pull out my phone to do. It feels a little like the early days of Alexa and Siri a decade ago, when you discovered that saying set a timer for 10 minutes beats opening your phones Clock app by a mile and you can do it with sticky fingers, too.

Except, oh wait, the AI Pin cant set an alarm or a timer. It cant add things to your calendar, either, or tell you whats already there. You can create notes and lists which appear in the Humane Center web app that is also where you connect the device to your contacts and review your uploaded photos but if you try to add something to the list later, itll almost always fail for some reason. The problem with so many voice assistants is that they cant do much and the AI Pin can do even less.

Humane has said its working on a lot of this functionality, and its surely true that a lot of this will get better over time as AI models and interfaces get better. Bongiorno tells me theres a huge software update coming this summer that will add timers, calendar access, more ways to use the touchpad, and much more. But at The Verge, our longstanding rule is that we review whats in the box, never the promise of future updates, and right now, its inexcusable that this stuff doesnt work on a device that costs as much as the AI Pin does.

Every time the AI Pin tries to do seemingly anything, it has to process your query through Humanes servers, which is at best quite slow and at worst a total failure. Asking the AI Pin to write down that the library book sale is next week: handy! Waiting for 10 seconds while it processes, processes, and then throws a generic couldnt add that error message: less handy. Id estimate that half the time I tried to call someone, it simply didnt call. Half the time someone called me, the AI Pin would kick it straight to voicemail without even ringing. After many days of testing, the one and only thing I can truly rely on the AI Pin to do is tell me the time.

The one and only thing I can truly rely on the AI Pin to do is tell me the time

The more I tested the AI Pin, the more it felt like the device was trying to do an awful lot and the hardware simply couldnt keep up. For one, its pretty much constantly warm. In my testing, it never got truly painfully hot, but after even a few minutes of using it, I could feel the battery like a hand warmer against my skin. Bongiorno says the warmth can come from overuse or when you have a bad signal and that the device is aggressive about shutting down when it gets too hot. Ive noticed: I use the AI Pin for more than a couple of minutes, and I get notified that it has overheated and needs to cool down. This happened a lot in my testing (including on a spring weekend in DC and in 40-degree New York City, where it was the only warm thing in sight).

The battery life is similarly rough. The AI Pin ships with two battery boosters, a charging case, and a desk charger, and youll make heavy use of all of it. I went through both boosters and the AI Pins smaller internal battery in the course of just a few hours of heavy testing. At one point, the AI Pin and a booster went from fully charged to completely dead in five hours, all while sitting untouched in my backpack. This thing is trying to do an awful lot, and it just doesnt seem able to keep up.

In fairness, youre not meant to use this device a lot. The whole point of the AI Pin is to get in, get out, and go back to living your life without technology. On my lightest days of testing which typically consisted of a couple of calls, a few texts, a half-dozen queries about the number of teaspoons in a tablespoon and whether its safe for dogs to eat grapes, and maybe a half-hour of music I didnt have many overheating issues, though the battery did still die well before the day ended. As long as you dont use the projector too much, the AI Pin can muddle through. But if Im going to pay this price and stick this thing so prominently on my body, it needs to do more than muddle.

The closest thing the AI Pin has to a screen is its Laser Ink projector. You summon it by tapping once on the touchpad or by asking it to show me something. If the AI Pin is speaking something to you aloud, you can also pick up your hand, and it will switch to projecting the text instead. The projector is also how you access settings, unlock your device, and more.

Whenever it wants to project, the AI Pin first sends a green dot looking for your hand. (It will only project on a hand, so my dream of projecting all my texts onto the sides of buildings is sadly dead.) After a few minutes, I memorized the sweet spot: about ribcage-high and a few inches away from my body. The projectors 720p resolution is crap, and it only projects green light, but it does a good-enough job of projecting text onto your hand unless youre in bright light, and then its just about invisible.

The projectors user interface is how can I put this nicely? bananas. To unlock your device, which you have to do every time you magnetically reattach the AI Pin, you move your hand forward and backward through a series of numbers and then pinch your thumb and forefinger together to select a number. It feels a bit like sliding a tiny trombone. Once youre unlocked, you see a homescreen of sorts, where you can see if youve gotten any recent texts or calls and tap your fingers through a menu of the time, the date, and the weather. To scroll, you tilt your hand forward and backward very slightly. To get to settings, you move your hand away from your body but not too far, or the projector loses you until a new radial menu comes up. To navigate that menu, youre supposed to roll your hand around like theres a marble in your palm. I swear to you, I never once managed to select the correct icon the first time. Its way too many interaction systems to memorize, especially when none of them work very well.

It feels like Humane decided early on that the AI Pin couldnt have a screen no matter what and did a bunch of product and interface gymnastics when a tiny touchscreen would have handled all of these things much better. Kudos to Humane for swinging big, but if youre going to try to do phone things, just make a phone.

The single coolest thing Ive been able to do with the AI Pin is something Ive done a few times now. I stand in front of a store or restaurant, press and hold on the touchpad, and say, Look at this restaurant and tell me if it has good reviews. The AI Pin snaps a photo with its camera, pings some image recognition models, figures out what Im looking at, scours the web for reviews, and returns it back. Tacombi has great reviews, it might say. People really like the tacos and the friendly staff.

Thats the best-case scenario. And I have experienced it a few times! Its very neat, and its the sort of thing that would take much longer and many more steps on a smartphone. But far more often, Ill stand in front of a restaurant, ask the AI Pin about it, and wait for what feels like forever only for it to fail entirely. It cant find the restaurant; the servers are not responding; it cant figure out what restaurant it is despite the gigantic Joe & The Juice sign four feet in front of me and the GPS chip in the device. Bongiorno says these issues can come from model hallucinations, server issues, and more, and that theyll get better over time.

In general, I would say that for every successful interaction with the AI Pin, Ive had three or four unsuccessful ones. Ill ask the weather in New York and get the right answer; then, Ill ask the weather in Dubai, and the AI Pin tells me that the current weather in Dubai is not available for the provided user location in New York. Ill ask about the thing with the presidents in South Dakota, and itll correctly tell me I mean Mount Rushmore, but then it will confidently misidentify the Brooklyn Bridge as the Triborough Bridge. And half the time seriously, at least half I dont even get an answer. The system just waits, and waits, and fails.

When I first started testing the AI Pin, I was excited to try it as a music player. I dream of going on walks or runs while leaving my phone at home, and the always-connected AI Pin seemed like a possible answer. Its not. For one thing, it only connects with Tidal, which means most people are immediately ruled out and also means no podcast support. For another, that connection is as broken as anything else on the AI Pin: I ask to play Beyoncs new album or songs by The 1975, and the AI Pin either cant connect to Tidal at all or cant play the song Im looking for. Sometimes it works fine! Way more often, I have interactions like this one:

Thats a real exchange I had, multiple times, over multiple days with the AI Pin. Bongiorno says this particular bug has been fixed, but I still cant get Tidal to play Cowboy Carter consistently. Its just broken.

Its all made worse by the AI Pins desire to be as clever as possible. Translation is one of its most hyped features, along with the fact that it supposedly automatically discerns which languages to translate. When you land in Spain, boom, it switches to Spanish. Super cool and futuristic, in theory. In reality, I spent an hour in our studio trying desperately to get the AI Pin to translate to Japanese or Korean, while The Verges Victoria Song who speaks both sat there talking to it in those languages to absolutely no avail. Rather than translate things, it would just say them back to her, in a horrible and occasionally almost mocking accent.

The language issues are indicative of the bigger problem facing the AI Pin, ChatGPT, and frankly, every other AI product out there: you cant see how it works, so its impossible to figure out how to use it. AI boosters say thats the point, that the tech just works and you shouldnt have to know how to use it, but oh boy, is that not the world we live in. Meanwhile, our phones are constant feedback machines colored buttons telling us what to tap, instant activity every time we touch or pinch or scroll. You can see your options and what happens when you pick one. With AI, you dont get any of that. Using the AI Pin feels like wishing on a star: you just close your eyes and hope for the best. Most of the time, nothing happens.

Using the AI Pin feels like wishing on a star: you just close your eyes and hope for the best

Still, even after all this frustration, after spending hours standing in front of restaurants tapping my chest and whispering questions that go unanswered, I find I want what Humane is selling even more than I expected. A one-tap way to say, Text Anna and tell her Ill be home in a half-hour, or Remember to call Mike tomorrow afternoon, or Take a picture of this and add it to my shopping list would be amazing. I hadnt realized how much of my phone usage consists of these one-step things, all of which would be easier and faster without the friction and distraction of my phone.

But the AI Pin doesnt work. I dont know how else to say it.

I hope Humane keeps going. I hope it builds in this basic functionality and figures out how to do more of it locally on the device without killing the battery. I hope it gets faster and more reliable. I hope Humane decides to make a watch, or smart glasses, or something more deliberately designed to be held in your hand. I hope it partners with more music services, more productivity apps, and more sources of knowledge about the internet and the world. I hope the price goes down.

But until all of that happens, and until the whole AI universe gets better, faster, and more functional, the AI Pin isnt going to feel remotely close to being done. Its a beta test, a prototype, a proof of concept that maybe someday there might be a killer device that does all of these things. I know with absolute certainty that the AI Pin is not that device. Its not worth $700, or $24 a month, or all the time and energy and frustration that using it requires. Its an exciting idea and an infuriating product.

AI gadgets might one day be great. But this isnt that day, and the AI Pin isnt that product. Ill take my phone back now, thanks.

More here:

Humane AI Pin review: the post-smartphone future isnt here yet - The Verge

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