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1. OpenAI's APIs have only solved the language problem reliably for a relatively short time; it takes a long time to develop consumer hardware. 2. OpenAI's API

1. OpenAI's APIs have only solved the language problem reliably for a relatively short time; it takes a long time to develop consumer hardware. 2. OpenAI's APIs are expensive, and building an alternative datacenter for running the open-source LLMs at scale is even more expensive (and probably not allowed under their licensing). And even bigco private LLMs like Bard are presumably pretty expensive for their creators to run. So, "the AI is free" model of Siri/Alexa/Google Assistant doesn't easily port itself to the newer tech. 3. If you try to avoid that by running the models locally... Getting reasonable performance requires expensive hardware, so something like a $49 Google Home Mini is out of the question for now. I think it's super likely that at some point, the current generation of home assistants are gonna get walloped by the better AIs we've seen developed. It just hasn't happened yet; someone needs to a) do it, and b) figure out the pricing model — either offer enough value that subscriptions become worth it vs worse-but-free alternatives, or sell some kind of larger-use-case at-home-AI box running local models that can also do home assistant stuff. Or just wait for the cost of running the models to come down, at which point you can just 1:1 port the current experience over, except you end up with much smarter assistants.

HDThoreaun 3y ago
Imo the big problem is that running the NLP for these devices is already expensive. Alexa lost $10 billion last year. I don't think the other smart homes are doing particularly well. Why would any VC want to get involved in this space when the largest tech companies have been in it for close to a decade now and are nowhere in terms of monetizing or even breaking even on the devices. And then you realize transitioning the response to an LLM would make the device even more expensive and the business makes no sense at all.
- hacker_gal 3y ago
  do you really need an LLM should be the question. Re smart home devices, I haven't seen anyone using it other than setting an alarm, timer, turning on/off the lights, playing music, checking the weather and so on. Probably there are max 1000 things. you can have an end-to-end spoken language understanding rather than speech-to-text and nlp separately. other than big tech, smaller speech companies - snips, picovoice, sensory are all doing that. just because amazon has billions of dollars to acquire user data, or acquire and kill smaller companies, it doesn't mean it's the best or only way.

HDThoreaun 3y ago

Imo the big problem is that running the NLP for these devices is already expensive. Alexa lost $10 billion last year. I don't think the other smart homes are doing particularly well. Why would any VC want to get involved in this space when the largest tech companies have been in it for close to a decade now and are nowhere in terms of monetizing or even breaking even on the devices. And then you realize transitioning the response to an LLM would make the device even more expensive and the business makes no sense at all.

hacker_gal 3y ago
do you really need an LLM should be the question. Re smart home devices, I haven't seen anyone using it other than setting an alarm, timer, turning on/off the lights, playing music, checking the weather and so on. Probably there are max 1000 things. you can have an end-to-end spoken language understanding rather than speech-to-text and nlp separately. other than big tech, smaller speech companies - snips, picovoice, sensory are all doing that. just because amazon has billions of dollars to acquire user data, or acquire and kill smaller companies, it doesn't mean it's the best or only way.