3 ms·

"Doomed to fail," probably. I certainly never expected to see a product so unabashedly quixotic this side of a zero-interest-rate era. But man, what a crazy swi

"Doomed to fail," probably. I certainly never expected to see a product so unabashedly quixotic this side of a zero-interest-rate era. But man, what a crazy swing for the fences this is. By my reckoning, this approach is probably ten years ahead of its time. I simply cannot imagine that the tech is there right now to make this nearly as seamless as it will need to be to actually supplant the UI paradigms we have today, and it's going to take billions invested by the duopoly to get to that point. But I really do think this is at least a fuzzy picture of where we're headed. Your iPhone in 2034 won't look like this, but you'll likely be able to trace some things back to it. There are a lot of pieces missing that we barely even know are missing yet, but it's incredibly exciting to see a startup try to jumpstart a step change like this.

com2kid 3y ago
Mobile ads and app stores make Apple and Google too much money for them to truly revolutionize mobile phone user interfaces. Anything that even threatens those business models will be strangled before it gets released. IMHO Microsoft has the most to gain here. If they manage to turn Apple and Android into platforms that interface with MS made/ran/hosted LLMs, MS wins the day. The problem is monetization, these LLM services are expensive, and telling users they need to pay another $30 a month to use their phone will be a hard sell. Hopefully LLM hosting costs go down, but if hosting LLMs becomes too affordable, MS's giant war chest of $ and hardware become less of an advantage. The other danger is Apple/Google throwing a bunch of restrictions in place, but all the anti-trust scrutiny they are under right now could give them pause on attempting that.
mattmaroon 3y ago
Idk, I think an iPhone in ten years will look a lot like it does now just with better Siri. Better Siri will open up a lot of things and it’ll be wonderful but we’ll still want a screen (we’ll still interact with the world largely via reading) and an iPhone just looks like a screen. Apple and Google presumably know about LLMs so I don’t really see this device being very influential.
- barnabee 3y ago
  I dunno. I could imagine replacing my iPhone and my laptop with something Rabbit sized and a lightweight set of AR glasses. But they need far more than the toy “OS” that Rabbit are demonstrating.
  - mattmaroon 3y ago
    Maybe. That'd be interesting I suppose. Those Meta smart glasses do look more usable than anything on the market previously. Maybe because they omit screens. Perhaps at some point technology will allow glasses to have screens that are functional without making you look like, as they called them ten years ago, a Glasshole. Ten years may be enough time.

com2kid 3y ago

Mobile ads and app stores make Apple and Google too much money for them to truly revolutionize mobile phone user interfaces. Anything that even threatens those business models will be strangled before it gets released. IMHO Microsoft has the most to gain here. If they manage to turn Apple and Android into platforms that interface with MS made/ran/hosted LLMs, MS wins the day. The problem is monetization, these LLM services are expensive, and telling users they need to pay another $30 a month to use their phone will be a hard sell. Hopefully LLM hosting costs go down, but if hosting LLMs becomes too affordable, MS's giant war chest of $ and hardware become less of an advantage. The other danger is Apple/Google throwing a bunch of restrictions in place, but all the anti-trust scrutiny they are under right now could give them pause on attempting that.

mattmaroon 3y ago

Idk, I think an iPhone in ten years will look a lot like it does now just with better Siri. Better Siri will open up a lot of things and it’ll be wonderful but we’ll still want a screen (we’ll still interact with the world largely via reading) and an iPhone just looks like a screen. Apple and Google presumably know about LLMs so I don’t really see this device being very influential.

barnabee 3y ago
I dunno. I could imagine replacing my iPhone and my laptop with something Rabbit sized and a lightweight set of AR glasses. But they need far more than the toy “OS” that Rabbit are demonstrating.
- mattmaroon 3y ago
  Maybe. That'd be interesting I suppose. Those Meta smart glasses do look more usable than anything on the market previously. Maybe because they omit screens. Perhaps at some point technology will allow glasses to have screens that are functional without making you look like, as they called them ten years ago, a Glasshole. Ten years may be enough time.