9 ms·

Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

315 points by ajuhasz 7mo ago

rimbo789 7mo ago
Ads in AI should be banned right now. We need to learn from mistakes of the internet (crypto, facebook) and aggressively regulate early and often before this gets too institutionalized to remove.
- piekvorst 7mo ago
  Ads (at least in the classical pre-AI sense) are by orders of magnitude better than preventive laws
  - rimbo789 7mo ago
    I trust corporations far far far less than government or lawmakers (who I also don’t trust). I know corporations will use ads in the most manipulative and destructive manner. Laws may be flawed but are worth the risk.
  - Marsymars 7mo ago
    I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably argue that Alaska would be orders of magnitude better off if they reversed the implementation of their billboard-banning ballot measure and put up billboards everywhere.
- nancyminusone 7mo ago
  They did learn. That's why they are adding ads.
- doomslayer999 7mo ago
  Boomers in government would be clueless on how to properly regulate and create correct incentives. Hell, that is still a bold ask for tech and economist geniuses with the best of intentions.
  - irishcoffee 7mo ago
    Would that be the same cohort of boomers jamming LLMs up our collective asses? So they don’t understand how to regulate a technology they don’t understand, but fucking by golly you’re going to be left behind if you don’t use it? This is like a shitty Disney movie.
    - doomslayer999 7mo ago
      It's mostly SV grifters who shoved LLMs up our asses. They then get in cahoots with boomers in the government to create policies and "investment schemes" that inflate their stock in a ponzi-like fashion and regulate competition. Why do you think Trump has some no-name crypto firm, or why Thiel has Vance as his whipping boy, and Elon spend a fortune trying to get Trump to win? This is a multiparty thing, as most politicians are heavily bought and paid for.
FeteCommuniste 7mo ago
The level of trust I have in a promise made by any existing AI company that such a device would never phone home: 0.
sxp 7mo ago
The article is forgetting about Anthropic which currently has the best agentic programmer and was the backbone for the recent OpenClaw assistants.
- ajuhasz 7mo ago
  True, we focused on hardware embodied AI assistants (smart speakers, smart glasses, etc) as those are the ones we believe will soon start leaving wake words behind and moving towards an always-on interaction design. The privacy implications of an always-listening smart speaker are magnitudes higher than OpenClaw that you intentionally interact with.
  - iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
    This. Kids already have tons of those gadgets on. Previously, I only really had to worry about a cell phone so even if someone was visiting, it was a simple case of plop all electronics here, but now with glasses I am not even sure how to reasonably approach this short of not allowing it period. Eh, brave new world.
  - popalchemist 7mo ago
    Both are pandoras box. Open Claw has access to your credit cards, social media accounts, etc by default (i.e. if you have them saved in your browser on the account that Open Claw runs on, which most people do.)
- gpm 7mo ago
  Also Mistral, which is definitely building AI assistants even if they aren't quite as successful so far.
kleiba 7mo ago
Always on is incompatible with data protection rights, such as the GDPR in Europe.
- ajuhasz 7mo ago
  With cloud based inference we agree, this being just one more benefit of doing everything with "edge" inference (on device inside the home) as we do with Juno.
  - popalchemist 7mo ago
    Pretty sure a) it's not a matter of whether you agree and b) GDPR still considers always-on listening to be something the affected user has to actively consent to. Since someone in a household may not realize that another person's device is "always on" and may even lack the ability to consent - such as a child - you are probably going to find that it is patently illegal according to both the letter and the spirit of the law. Is your argument that these affected parties are not users and that the GDPR does not require their consent? Don't take this as hostility. I am 100% for local inference. But that is the way I understand the law, and I do think it benefits us to hold companies to a high standard. Because even such a device could theoretically be used against a person, or could have other unintended consequences.
NickJLange 7mo ago
This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to address the issue. For once,we (as the technologists) have a free translator to laymen speak via the frontier LLMs, which can be an opportunity to educate the masses as to the exact world on the horizon.
- Nevermark 7mo ago
  > This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to address the issue. It is actually both a technology and regulation/law issue. What can be solved with the former should be. What is left, solved with the latter. With the best cases where both consistently/redundantly uphold our rights. I want legal privacy protections, consistent with privacy preserving technology. Inconsistencies create technical and legal openings for nefarious or irresponsible powers.
- knallfrosch 7mo ago
  You could start by not buying an always-on AI device. Just saying. (The article is an AI ad.)
doomslayer999 7mo ago
Who would buy OpenAI's spy device? I think a lot of public discourse and backlash about the greedy, anticompetitive, and exploitative practices of the silicon valley elite have gone mainstream and will hopefully course correct the industry in time.
- janice1999 7mo ago
  > ...exploitative practices of the silicon valley elite have gone mainstream and will hopefully course correct the industry in time. I have little hope that is true. Don't expect privacy laws and boycott campaigns. That very same elite control the law via bribes to US politicians (and indirectly the laws of other counties via those politicians threats, see the ongoing watering down of EU laws). They also directly control public discourse via ownership of the media and mainstream communication platforms. What backlash can they really suffer?
- notatoad 7mo ago
  i'm continually surprised by how many people will buy and wear meta's AI spy sunglasses. if there's a market for a face camera that sends everything you see to meta, there's probably a market for whatever device openAI launches.
- alansaber 7mo ago
  Loads of people? The Ari Alexa was tremendously successful as a consumer product no? It's the same premise but "better"
BoxFour 7mo ago
This strikes me as a pretty weak rationalization for "safe" always-on assistants. Even if the model runs locally, there’s still a serious privacy issue: Unwitting victims of something recording everything they said. Friends at your house who value their privacy probably won’t feel great knowing you’ve potentially got a transcript of things they said just because they were in the room. Sure, it's still better than also sending everything up to OpenAI, but that doesn’t make it harmless or less creepy. Unless you’ve got super-reliable speaker diarization and can truly ensure only opted-in voices are processed, it’s hard to see how any always-listening setup ever sits well with people who value their privacy.
- ajuhasz 7mo ago
  We give an overview of our the current memory architecture at https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on... This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section. We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture. > The shared household memory pool creates privacy situations we’re still working through. The current design has everyone in the family shares the same memory corpus. Should a child be able to see a memory their parents created? Our current answer is to deliberately tune the memory extraction to be household-wide with no per-person scoping because a kitchen device hears everyone equally. But “deliberately chose” doesn’t mean “solved.” We’re hoping our in-house STT will allow us to do per-person memory tagging and then we can experiment with scoping memories to certain people or groups of people in the household.
  - com2kid 7mo ago
    Heyas! Glad to see someone making this I wrote a blog post about this exact product space a year ago. https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-innovative-sht https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-... I hope y'all succeed! The potential use cases for locally hosted AI dwarf what can be done with SaSS. I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.
paxys 7mo ago
This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company (https://juno-labs.com/ https://juno-labs.com/) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Have all your guests consented to this? What happens when someone breaks in and steals the box? What if the government wants to take a look at the data in there and serves a warrant? What if a large company comes knocking and makes an acquistion offer? Will all the privacy guarantees still stand in face of the $$$ ?
- zmmmmm 7mo ago
  The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in the first place. It's a bit sad as the potential for what technology can do to assist us grows that this actually may be the limit on how much we can fully take advantage of it. I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to legislate that personal private information held in technical devices is legally treated the same as information held in your brain. Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential (deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing the opposite way.
  - ajuhasz 7mo ago
    Agreed, while we've tried to think through this and build in protections we can't pretend that there is a magical perfect solution. We do have strong conviction that doing this inside the walls of your home is much safer than doing it within any companies datacenter (I accept that some just don't want this to exist period and we won't be able to appease them). Some of our decisions in this direction: - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory - Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen) - Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM) We're always open to criticism on how to improve our implementation around this.
zmmmmm 7mo ago
It's interesting to me that there seems to be an implicit line being drawn around what's acceptable and what's not between video and audio. If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to engineer it to be tamper resistant. But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent, flashing lights or other privacy preserving measures. And it's true, it's fundamentally different, because I have to make a proactive choice to speak, but I can't avoid being visible. So you can construct a logical argument for it. I'm curious how this will really go down as these become pervasively available. Microphones are pretty easy to embed almost invisibly into wearables. A lot of them already have them. They don't use a lot of power, it won't be too hard to just have them always on. If we settle on this as the line, what's it going to mean that everything you say, everywhere will be presumed recorded? Is that OK?
- BoxFour 7mo ago
  > Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent That’s not accurate. There are plenty of states that require everyone involved to consent to a recording of a private conversation. California, for example. Voice assistants today skirt around that because of the wake word, but always-on recording obviously negates that defense.
  - paxys 7mo ago
    AI "recording" software has never been tested in court, so no one can say what the legality is. If we are having a conversation (in a two party consent state) and a secret AI in my pocket generates a text transcript of it in real time without storing the audio, is that illegal? What about if it just generates a summary? What about if it is just a list of TODOs that came out of the conversation?
    - pclmulqdq 7mo ago
      Speech-to-text has gone through courts before. It's not a new technology. You're out of luck on sneaking the use of speech-to-text in 2-party consent states.
ripped_britches 7mo ago
I think local inference is great for many things - but this stance seems to conflate that you can’t have privacy with server side inference, and you can’t have nefariousness with client side inference. A device that does 100% client side inference can still phone home unless it’s disconnected from internet. Most people will want internet-connected agents right? And server side inference can be private if engineered correctly (strong zero retention guarantees, maybe even homomorphic encryption)
thundergolfer 7mo ago
I agree with the core premise that the big AI companies are fundamentally driven towards advertising revenue and other antagonistic but profit-generating functionality. Also agree with paxys that the social implications here are deep and troubling. Having ambient AI in a home, even if it's caged to the home, has tricky privacy problems. I really like the explorations of this space done in Black Mirror's The Entire History of You[1] and Ted Chiang's The Truth of Fact short story[2]. My bet is that the home and other private spaces almost completely yield to computer surveillance, despite the obvious problems. We've already seen this happen with social media and home surveillance cameras. Just as in Chiang's story spaces were 'invaded' by writing, AI will fill the world and those opting out will occupy the same marginal positions as those occupied by dumb phone users and people without home cameras or televisions. Interesting times ahead. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...
Animats 7mo ago
> Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company Apple? [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/
- kibwen 7mo ago
  Yes, Apple is an ad company. Their annual ad revenue is in the billions, and climbing every year.
  - bitpush 7mo ago
    Its always fascinating that HN crowd seems to be blind to Apple's very obvious transgressions. Even the article makes the mistake. They paint every company with a broad brush ("all AI companies are ad companies") but for Apple they are more sympathetic "We can quibble about Apple". Apple's reality distort field is so strong. People still think they are not in ad business. People still think they stand up to government, and folks chose to ignore hard evidence (Apple operates in China on CCP's pleasure. Apple presents a gold plaque to President Trump to curry favors and removes ICEBlock apps ..) There's no pushback, there's no spine. Every company is disgusting. Apple is hypocritical and disgusting.
HenryOsborn 7mo ago
This was the inevitable endpoint of the current AI unit economics. When inference costs are this high and open-source models are compressing SaaS margins to zero, companies can't survive on standard subscription models. They have to subsidize the compute by monetizing the user's context window. The real liability isn't just ads; it's what happens when autonomous agents start making financial decisions influenced by sponsored retrieval data.
- danny_codes 7mo ago
  Thing is there are OSS models that are near as good. So I don’t see why you’d stay for ad flop when you can just point openrouter one to the left.
nfgrep 7mo ago
> There needs to be a business model based on selling the hardware and software, not the data the hardware collects. An architecture where the company that makes the device literally cannot access the data it processes, because there is no connection to access it through. Genuine Q: Is this business model still feasible? Its hard to imagine anyone other than apple sustaining a business off of hardware; they have the power to spit out full hardware refreshes every year. How do you keep a team of devs alive on the seemingly one-and-done cash influx of first-time-buyers?
luxuryballs 7mo ago
I guess it goes to show that real value is in the broader market to a certain extent, if they can’t just sell people the power they and up just earning a commission for helping someone else sell a product.
lifestyleguru 7mo ago
How long web search had been objective, nice, and helpful - 10 years? Now things are happening faster so there is max 5 years in total of AI prompt pretending that they want to help.
freakynit 7mo ago
I mean why is it so difficult for such companies to understand the core thing: irrespective of whether the data related to our daily lives gets processed on their servers or ours, we DON'T want it stored beyond a few minutes at max. Even if these folks are giving away this device for 100% free, I'll still not keep it inside my house.
- soared 7mo ago
  Because storing, analyzing, and selling access to your data is massively profitable and they don’t care what the (not even vocal) privacy focused minority wants.
sciencesama 7mo ago
We need an ai adblocker !!
HWR_14 7mo ago
I really dislike the preorder page. The fact that it's a deposit is in a different color that fades into the background, and it refers to it as a "price" multiple times. I don't know if it was intentionally deceptive, but it made me dislike this company.
econ 7mo ago
Just when you've asked if there are eggs the doorbell rings, the neighbor stands there in disbelief, it told me to bring you eggs? Give him the half bottle vodka, it's going to expire soon and his son will make a surprise visit tonight. An argument arises and it participates by encouraging both parties with extra talking points. But this was only the beginning, after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to complete sentences so successfully the conversation gradually dies out. After a few days of silence... Narrator mode activated....
- fwipsy 7mo ago
  I'm invested in this scenario now, you should write a short story.
  - deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
- walterbell 7mo ago
  > after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to complete sentences Apple bought those for $2B.. coming to Siri.
- halper 7mo ago
  Vodka that expires must be the epitome of enshittification!
shevy-java 7mo ago
> The most helpful AI will also be the most intimate technology ever built. It will hear everything. See everything Big Brother is watching you. Who knew it would be AI ... The author is quite right. It will be an advertisement scam. I wonder whether people will accept that though. Anyone remembers ublock origin? Google killed it on chrome. People are not going to forget that. (It still works fine on Firefox but Google bribed Firefox into submission; all that Google ad money made Firefox weak.) Recently I had to use google search again. I was baffled at how useless it became - not just from the raw results but the whole UI - first few entries are links to useless youtube videos (also owned by Google). I don't have time to watch a video; I want the text info and extract it quickly. Using AI "summaries" is also useless - Google is just trying to waste my time compared to the "good old days". After those initial videos to youtube, I get about 6 results, three of which are to some companies writing articles so people visit their boring website. Then I get "other people searched for candy" and other useless links. I never understood why I would care what OTHER people search for when I want to search for something. Is this now group-search? Group-think 1984? And then after that, I get some more videos at youtube. Google is clearly building a watered-down private variant of the web. Same problem with AMP pages. Google is annoying us - and has become a huge problem. (I am writing this on thorium right now, which is also chrome-based; Firefox does not allow me to play videos with audio as I don't have or use pulseaudio whereas the chrome-based browser does not care and my audio works fine - that shows you the level of incompetency at Mozilla. They don't WANT to compete against Google anymore. And did not want since decades. Ladybird unfortunately also is not going to change anything; after I critisized one of their decisions, they banned me. Well, that's a great way to try to build up an alternative when you deal with criticism via censorship - all before leaving alpha or beta already. Now imagine the amount of censorship you will get once millions of people WERE to use it ... something is fundamentally wrong with the whole modern web, and corporations have a lot to do with this; to a lesser extent also people but of course not all of them)
- FeteCommuniste 7mo ago
  It would be really great if Google had a setting that allowed you to exclude certain domains from all searches by default. Like you, a YouTube video (or a Facebook page, or an Instagram or Twitter post) is basically never what I am looking for.
emsign 7mo ago
First it's ads, then it's political agenda. We've seen this inconspicuous transition happen with social media and it will happen even more inconspicuously with LLMs.
dasil003 7mo ago
Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't understand the appeal of the always-on AI assistant at all. Even leaving privacy/security issues aside, and even if it gets super smart and capable, it feels like it would have a distancing effect from my own life, and undermine my own agency in shaping it. I'm not against AI in general, and some assistant-like functionality that functions on demand to search my digital footprint and handle necessary but annoying administrative tasks seems useful. But it feels like at some point it becomes a solution looking for a problem, and to squeeze out the last ounce of context-aware automation and efficiency you would have to outsource parts of your core mental model and situational awareness of your life. Imagine being over-scheduled like an executive who's assistant manages their calendar, but it's not a human it's a computer, and instead of it being for the purpose of maximizing the leverage of your attention as a captain of industry, it's just to maintain velocity on a personal rat race of your own making with no especially wide impact, even on your own psyche.
- fragmede 7mo ago
  It's the rat race. I gotta get my cheese, and fuck you, because you getting cheese means I go hungry. The kindergarden lesson on sharing got replaced by a lesson on intellectual property. Copyright, trademark, patents, and you. Or we could opt out, and help everyone get ahead, on the rising tide lifts all boats theory, but from what I've seen, the trickle of trickle down economics is urine.
- kaffekaka 7mo ago
  Agree. No matter how useful AI is and will become - I use AI daily, it is an amazing technology - so much of the discourse is indeed a solution looking for a problem. I have colleagues suggesting on exactly everything "can we put an MCP in it" and they don't even know what the point of MCP is!
- larusso 7mo ago
  Totally agree. Sounds some envision want some level of Downton Abbey without the humans as service personal. A footman / maid in every room or corner to handle your requests at any given moment.
- 7mo ago
michelsedgh 7mo ago
Does anyone know how this device will filter out other voices like TV talking and stuff like that?
0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
> The always-on future is inevitable Not if you use open source. Not if you pay for services contractually will not mine your data. Not if you support start-ups that commit to privacy and the banning of ads. I said on another thread recently that we need to kill Android, that we need a new Mobile Linux that gives us total control over what our devices do, our software does. Not controlled by a corporation. Not with some bizarre "store" that floods us with millions of malware-ridden apps, yet bans perfectly valid ones. We have to take control of our own destiny, not keep handing it over to someone else for convenience's sake. And it doesn't end at mobile. We need to find, and support, the companies that are actually ethical. And we need to stop using services that are conveniently free. Vote with your dollars.
- bigyabai 7mo ago
  We have mobile Linux. It's only supported on less than a dozen handsets and runs like shit, but we have it already. The reason nobody uses mobile Linux is that it has to compete with AOSP-derived OSes like LineageOS and GrapheneOS, which don't suck or run like shit. This is what it looks like when people vote with their dollars, people want the status-quo we have (despite the horrible economic damages).
- ponector 7mo ago
  >> that gives us total control over what our devices do Like rooted Android phone, which is useless for regular folks because many critical apps doesn't work (like banking).
  - Gander5739 7mo ago
    I have a rooted Android phone and my banking app works fine, with relatively little effort to get it working. Though rooting is quite niche, so it's easy enough for banks to disallow it completely when accessing their apps. If root access were as common on mobile devices as on desktop I doubt there would be any problems at all.
witnessme 7mo ago
The concern is real but the local solution is not ready. The author does not seem to think about that from the perspective of an "average consumer". I have been running my personal AI assistant on a consumer-grade computer, for almost an year now. It can do only one in thousand of the tasks that cloud models can do and that too at a much slow pace. Local ai assistant on consumer grade hardware is at least a few year away, and "always-on" is much further than that IMO.
Sparkyte 7mo ago
I mean google was always an ad company and search engine. SOOOO hasn't changed much.
- alansaber 7mo ago
  Google can still (albeit with enormous difficulty) die as a company. If LLM search eclipses SEO and Gemini doesn't work out they're in trouble.
jeandejean 7mo ago
> The always-on future is inevitable Well the consumers will decide. Some people will find it very useful, but some others will not necessarily like this... Considering how many times I heard people yelling "OK GOOGLE" for "the gate" to open, I'm not sure a continuous flow of heavily contextualized human conversation will necessarily be easier to decipher? I know guys, AI is magic and will solve everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ordered me eggs and butter when I mentioned out loud I was out of it but actually happy about this because I was just about to go on vacations. My surprise when I'm back: melted butter and rotten eggs at my door...
aaron465 7mo ago
Advertising and AI colliding is gonna be horrible, but their post is also just an ad itself
tolerance 7mo ago
The product that’s being implicitly advertised here is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesn’t even appear to be a real photo of the thing and if that’s an indicator of the quality of the product then I must assume that it is poor and the people responsible also apparently do not have the money to hire a capable web designer and I’m sorry if this is harsh or unnecessary but I never thought I would miss the generic Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever bougie framework other companies use because boy the layout here does not elicit great expectations for their product either and I’m worried that if it ever does ship that nefarious parties will intercept all the private communications of its unfortunate owners and in an ironic sort of way their devices will become the first sort of reverse ad agent that does not transmit advertisements but receives advertisements in the form of the raw interests of their clients fed to said nefarious parties and then laundered through more traditional channels. A man-in-the-middle-of-the-middle-man.
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesn’t even appear to be a real photo Given they're "still finalizing the design and materials" and are not based in China, I think it's a safe bet that the first run will either be delayed or be an alpha.
- tempodox 7mo ago
  In addition to being vaporware, it’s presumably vibecoded slop, so: vaporslop.
- ajuhasz 7mo ago
  The first version will use small batch production techniques like 3D printing and small volume PCB manufacturing. On the photos, we thought it to be more appropriate to show a sketch vs a pretty AI generated photo that is true to anything yet but presents well. We have some details here on how we’re doing the prototyping with some photos of the current prototype: https://juno-labs.com/blogs/how-we-validate-our-custom-ai-hardware-concept-using-ipads https://juno-labs.com/blogs/how-we-validate-our-custom-ai-ha...
  - 7mo ago
bandrami 7mo ago
The always-on future is absolutely not inevitable but I get that people have a lot of money riding on convincing people it is
- alansaber 7mo ago
  It's a very profitable idea admittedly
alfiedotwtf 7mo ago
I’ve moved to Opencode, and I don’t see myself ever leaving it (if there were no alternatives ie AI glasses etc)
- s09dfhks 7mo ago
  I've been using it a bit as well. I'm trying to figure out how they're making money off free tier users though. Any ideas?
  - alfiedotwtf 7mo ago
    I haven’t even thought about that tbh. I’m guessing if they have enough of an injection, they’ll “figure it out later”
ghywertelling 7mo ago
One point I see less discussed, not related to the post, is "We never trained people to pay for software. If there existed proper global payment mechanism for software companies, the whole trajectory would look different. People are ok to pay 5$ for a coffee but not for software which makes their lives easier."
deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
BrenBarn 7mo ago
We're getting closer to a world where every company is an ad company, period. It seems like there are more and more ads touting a dwindling number of actual products.
5o1ecist 7mo ago
[flagged]
- JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
  > not enough people speak about the normalization of the global surveillance machine, with Big Brother waiting around the corner Everyone online is constantly talking about it. The truth is for most people it's fine. Some folks are upset by it. But we by and large tend to just solve the problem at the smallest possible scale and then mollify ourselbves with whining. (I don't have social media. I don't have cameras in or around my home. I've worked on privacy legislation, but honestly nobody called their representatives and so nothing much happened. I no longer really bring up privacy issues when I speak to my electeds because I haven't seen evidence that nihilism has passed.)
  - 5o1ecist 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
      > I'm not convinced that there is a point in attempting explaining it That encapsulates my point. I’ve worked on various pieces of legislation. All privately. A few made it into state and federal law. Broadly speaking, the ones that make it are the ones for which you can’t get their supporters to stop calling in on. Privacy issues are notoriously shit at getting people to call their electeds on. The exception is when you can find traction outside tech, or if the target is directly a tech company.
      - tokioyoyo 7mo ago
        Pretty much this. Nobody really actually cares. People will cite 1984 twenty million times, but since they're very disconnected from 3rd order effects of cross-company data brokerage, it doesn't really matter. I used to care about it before as well, but life became much easier once I took the "normie stand" on some of the issues.
tempodox 7mo ago
This is just an ad for maximally intrusive “AI”. We’re quite inured by now to all the dystopian nightmares, so this barely even registers.
emsign 7mo ago
Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. This is the age of enlightenment in reverse, the age of immaturity.
ardeaver 7mo ago
Perhaps I'm not totally clear on how this particular device works, but it doesn't seem like it has no ability to connect to the Internet. Honestly, I'd say privacy is just as much about economics as it is technical architecture. If you've taken outside funding from institutional venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before you're asked to make even more money™, and you may issue a quiet, boring change to your terms and conditions that you hope no one will read... Suddenly, you're removing mentions of your company's old "Don't Be Evil" slogan.
13pixels 7mo ago
The explicit ads angle is only half the story. Even without paid placements, these models already have implicit recommendations baked in. We ran queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity asking for product recommendations in ~30 B2B categories. The overlap between what each model recommends is surprisingly low -- around 40% agreement on the top 5 picks for any given category. And the correlation with Google search rankings? About 0.08. So we already have a world where which CRM or analytics tool gets recommended depends on which model someone happens to ask, and nobody -- not the models, not the brands, not the users -- has any transparency into why. That's arguably more dangerous than explicit ads, because at least with ads you know you're being sold to.
- ACCount37 7mo ago
  What you're saying is "different LLMs recommend different things". Replace "LLMs" with "random schmucks online" and what changes exactly?
  - jayd16 7mo ago
    No one is arguing to replace everything with random schmucks.
    - ACCount37 7mo ago
      Why would one argue for the status quo?
stego-tech 7mo ago
Contextual irony aside, this is a big reason why the proposal of leveraging AI agents for workflow processing in lieu of using them to develop fixed software to perform the same functions has always struck me as weird, and of late come across as completely nonsensical. If you're paying someone else to run the inference for these models, or even to build these models, then you're ultimately relying on their specific preferences for which tools, brands, products, companies, and integrations they prefer, not necessarily what you need or want. If and when they deprecate the model your agentic workflow is built on, you now have to rebuild and re-validate it on whatever the new model is. Even if you go out of your way to run things entirely locally with expensive inference kit and a full security harness to keep things in check, you could spend a lot less just having it vomit up some slopcode that one of your human specialists can validate and massage into perpetual functionality before walling it off on a VM or container somewhere for the next twenty years. The more you're outsourcing workflows wholesale to these bots, the more you're making yourself vulnerable to the business objectives of whoever hosts and builds those bots. If you're just using it as a slop machine to get you the software you want and that IT can support indefinitely, then you're going to be much better off in the long run.
- rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
  It’s the siren song of the lazy
  - stego-tech 7mo ago
    It's the siren song of the myopically lazy. It's laziness today in exchange for harder work tomorrow, with the wager that tomorrow's harder work will be even lazier thanks to advances in technology. Whereas I'd self-describe as "strategically lazy". It's building iterable code and repeatable processes today, so I can be lazy far into the future. It's engineering solutions today that are easier to support with lazier efforts tomorrow, regardless of whether things improve or get worse. Building processes around agents predicated on a specific model is myopically lazy, because you'll be rebuilding and debugging that entire setup next year when your chosen agent is deprecated or retired. Those of us building documented code with agents today, will have an easier time debugging it in the future because the hard work is already done. Incidentally, we'll also have gainful employment tomorrow by un-fucking agent-based workflows that didn't translate into software when tokens were cheap and subsidized by VCs for market capture purposes.
vivzkestrel 7mo ago
- new startup idea: sound proof boxes for all your electronic devices - put them inside the soundproof box and they cannot hear anything outside - the box even shows the amount of time for which the device has not been able to snoop on you daily
- schaefer 7mo ago
  I already have a refrigerator. Thanks. :)
- rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
  I’m more and more drawn to the Enemy of the State solution.
phtrivier 7mo ago
Is anthropic using ads ? Is mistral using ads ? Is déepseek using ads ? Google, meta, and amazon, sure, of course. It's interesting that the "every company" part is only open ai... They're now part of the "bad guys spying on you to display ads." At least it's a viable business model, maybe they can recoup capex and yearly losses in a couple decades instead of a couple centuries.
didntknowyou 7mo ago
kinda depressing the race general intelligence is motivated by the potential to profit from ad sales.
plastic041 7mo ago
It can't read my mind. This means that I have to say "I need to buy eggs" out loud in front of the machine (or in another room, depending on how good the microphone is). I'd rather just say "Hey Siri, remind me to buy eggs" to my phone.
fsniper 7mo ago
I am just curious, how many ad companies the whole world needs?
insane_dreamer 7mo ago
While I applaud the efforts to make AI inference local-only, I also fail to see the need for AI inference that relies on collecting continuous information. Yes, implicit activation (i.e., keyword) results in a less effective model that doesn't automatically order eggs for me. But I don't really need the more effective model (shopping list post-it on the fridge works just fine, actually). It's a solution looking for a problem.

315 points by ajuhasz 7mo ago

Ads in AI should be banned right now. We need to learn from mistakes of the internet (crypto, facebook) and aggressively regulate early and often before this gets too institutionalized to remove.

piekvorst 7mo ago
Ads (at least in the classical pre-AI sense) are by orders of magnitude better than preventive laws
- rimbo789 7mo ago
  I trust corporations far far far less than government or lawmakers (who I also don’t trust). I know corporations will use ads in the most manipulative and destructive manner. Laws may be flawed but are worth the risk.
- Marsymars 7mo ago
  I'm not sure how anyone could reasonably argue that Alaska would be orders of magnitude better off if they reversed the implementation of their billboard-banning ballot measure and put up billboards everywhere.
nancyminusone 7mo ago
They did learn. That's why they are adding ads.
doomslayer999 7mo ago
Boomers in government would be clueless on how to properly regulate and create correct incentives. Hell, that is still a bold ask for tech and economist geniuses with the best of intentions.
- irishcoffee 7mo ago
  Would that be the same cohort of boomers jamming LLMs up our collective asses? So they don’t understand how to regulate a technology they don’t understand, but fucking by golly you’re going to be left behind if you don’t use it? This is like a shitty Disney movie.
  - doomslayer999 7mo ago
    It's mostly SV grifters who shoved LLMs up our asses. They then get in cahoots with boomers in the government to create policies and "investment schemes" that inflate their stock in a ponzi-like fashion and regulate competition. Why do you think Trump has some no-name crypto firm, or why Thiel has Vance as his whipping boy, and Elon spend a fortune trying to get Trump to win? This is a multiparty thing, as most politicians are heavily bought and paid for.

FeteCommuniste 7mo ago

The level of trust I have in a promise made by any existing AI company that such a device would never phone home: 0.

sxp 7mo ago

The article is forgetting about Anthropic which currently has the best agentic programmer and was the backbone for the recent OpenClaw assistants.

ajuhasz 7mo ago
True, we focused on hardware embodied AI assistants (smart speakers, smart glasses, etc) as those are the ones we believe will soon start leaving wake words behind and moving towards an always-on interaction design. The privacy implications of an always-listening smart speaker are magnitudes higher than OpenClaw that you intentionally interact with.
- iugtmkbdfil834 7mo ago
  This. Kids already have tons of those gadgets on. Previously, I only really had to worry about a cell phone so even if someone was visiting, it was a simple case of plop all electronics here, but now with glasses I am not even sure how to reasonably approach this short of not allowing it period. Eh, brave new world.
- popalchemist 7mo ago
  Both are pandoras box. Open Claw has access to your credit cards, social media accounts, etc by default (i.e. if you have them saved in your browser on the account that Open Claw runs on, which most people do.)
gpm 7mo ago
Also Mistral, which is definitely building AI assistants even if they aren't quite as successful so far.

kleiba 7mo ago

Always on is incompatible with data protection rights, such as the GDPR in Europe.

ajuhasz 7mo ago
With cloud based inference we agree, this being just one more benefit of doing everything with "edge" inference (on device inside the home) as we do with Juno.
- popalchemist 7mo ago
  Pretty sure a) it's not a matter of whether you agree and b) GDPR still considers always-on listening to be something the affected user has to actively consent to. Since someone in a household may not realize that another person's device is "always on" and may even lack the ability to consent - such as a child - you are probably going to find that it is patently illegal according to both the letter and the spirit of the law. Is your argument that these affected parties are not users and that the GDPR does not require their consent? Don't take this as hostility. I am 100% for local inference. But that is the way I understand the law, and I do think it benefits us to hold companies to a high standard. Because even such a device could theoretically be used against a person, or could have other unintended consequences.

NickJLange 7mo ago

This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to address the issue. For once,we (as the technologists) have a free translator to laymen speak via the frontier LLMs, which can be an opportunity to educate the masses as to the exact world on the horizon.

Nevermark 7mo ago
> This isn't a technology issue. Regulation is the only sane way to address the issue. It is actually both a technology and regulation/law issue. What can be solved with the former should be. What is left, solved with the latter. With the best cases where both consistently/redundantly uphold our rights. I want legal privacy protections, consistent with privacy preserving technology. Inconsistencies create technical and legal openings for nefarious or irresponsible powers.
knallfrosch 7mo ago
You could start by not buying an always-on AI device. Just saying. (The article is an AI ad.)

doomslayer999 7mo ago

Who would buy OpenAI's spy device? I think a lot of public discourse and backlash about the greedy, anticompetitive, and exploitative practices of the silicon valley elite have gone mainstream and will hopefully course correct the industry in time.

janice1999 7mo ago
> ...exploitative practices of the silicon valley elite have gone mainstream and will hopefully course correct the industry in time. I have little hope that is true. Don't expect privacy laws and boycott campaigns. That very same elite control the law via bribes to US politicians (and indirectly the laws of other counties via those politicians threats, see the ongoing watering down of EU laws). They also directly control public discourse via ownership of the media and mainstream communication platforms. What backlash can they really suffer?
notatoad 7mo ago
i'm continually surprised by how many people will buy and wear meta's AI spy sunglasses. if there's a market for a face camera that sends everything you see to meta, there's probably a market for whatever device openAI launches.
alansaber 7mo ago
Loads of people? The Ari Alexa was tremendously successful as a consumer product no? It's the same premise but "better"

BoxFour 7mo ago

This strikes me as a pretty weak rationalization for "safe" always-on assistants. Even if the model runs locally, there’s still a serious privacy issue: Unwitting victims of something recording everything they said. Friends at your house who value their privacy probably won’t feel great knowing you’ve potentially got a transcript of things they said just because they were in the room. Sure, it's still better than also sending everything up to OpenAI, but that doesn’t make it harmless or less creepy. Unless you’ve got super-reliable speaker diarization and can truly ensure only opted-in voices are processed, it’s hard to see how any always-listening setup ever sits well with people who value their privacy.

ajuhasz 7mo ago
We give an overview of our the current memory architecture at https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on... This is something we call out under the "What we got wrong" section. We're currently collecting an audio dataset that should help create a speech-to-text (STT) model that incorporates speaker identification and that tag will be weaved into the core of the memory architecture. > The shared household memory pool creates privacy situations we’re still working through. The current design has everyone in the family shares the same memory corpus. Should a child be able to see a memory their parents created? Our current answer is to deliberately tune the memory extraction to be household-wide with no per-person scoping because a kitchen device hears everyone equally. But “deliberately chose” doesn’t mean “solved.” We’re hoping our in-house STT will allow us to do per-person memory tagging and then we can experiment with scoping memories to certain people or groups of people in the household.
- com2kid 7mo ago
  Heyas! Glad to see someone making this I wrote a blog post about this exact product space a year ago. https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-innovative-sht https://meanderingthoughts.hashnode.dev/lets-do-some-actual-... I hope y'all succeed! The potential use cases for locally hosted AI dwarf what can be done with SaSS. I hope the memory crisis isn't hurting you too badly.

paxys 7mo ago

This spiel is hilarious in the context of the product this company (https://juno-labs.com/ https://juno-labs.com/) is pushing – an always on, always listening AI device that inserts itself into your and your family’s private lives. “Oh but they only run on local hardware…” Okay, but that doesn't mean every aspect of our lives needs to be recorded and analyzed by an AI. Are you okay with private and intimate conversations and moments (including of underage family members) being saved for replaying later? Have all your guests consented to this? What happens when someone breaks in and steals the box? What if the government wants to take a look at the data in there and serves a warrant? What if a large company comes knocking and makes an acquistion offer? Will all the privacy guarantees still stand in face of the $$$ ?

zmmmmm 7mo ago
The fundamental problem with a lot of this is that the legal system is absolute: if information exists, it is accessible. If the courts order it, nothing you can do can prevent the information being handed over, even if that means a raid of your physical premises. Unless you encrypt it in a manner resistant to any way you can be compelled to decrypt it, the only way to have privacy is for information not to exist in the first place. It's a bit sad as the potential for what technology can do to assist us grows that this actually may be the limit on how much we can fully take advantage of it. I do sometimes wish it would be seen as an enlightened policy to legislate that personal private information held in technical devices is legally treated the same as information held in your brain. Especially for people for whom assistive technology is essential (deaf, blind, etc). But everything we see says the wind is blowing the opposite way.
- ajuhasz 7mo ago
  Agreed, while we've tried to think through this and build in protections we can't pretend that there is a magical perfect solution. We do have strong conviction that doing this inside the walls of your home is much safer than doing it within any companies datacenter (I accept that some just don't want this to exist period and we won't be able to appease them). Some of our decisions in this direction: - Minimize how long we have "raw data" in memory - Tune the memory extraction to be very discriminating and err on the side of forgetting (https://juno-labs.com/blogs/building-memory-for-an-always-on-ai-that-listens-to-your-kitchen) - Encrypt storage with hardware protected keys (we're building on top of the Nvidia Jetson SOM) We're always open to criticism on how to improve our implementation around this.

zmmmmm 7mo ago

It's interesting to me that there seems to be an implicit line being drawn around what's acceptable and what's not between video and audio. If there's a camera in an AI device (like Meta Ray Ban glasses) then there's a light when it's on, and they are going out of their way to engineer it to be tamper resistant. But audio - this seems to be on the other side of the line. Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent, flashing lights or other privacy preserving measures. And it's true, it's fundamentally different, because I have to make a proactive choice to speak, but I can't avoid being visible. So you can construct a logical argument for it. I'm curious how this will really go down as these become pervasively available. Microphones are pretty easy to embed almost invisibly into wearables. A lot of them already have them. They don't use a lot of power, it won't be too hard to just have them always on. If we settle on this as the line, what's it going to mean that everything you say, everywhere will be presumed recorded? Is that OK?

BoxFour 7mo ago
> Passively listening ambient audio is being treated as something that doesn't need active consent That’s not accurate. There are plenty of states that require everyone involved to consent to a recording of a private conversation. California, for example. Voice assistants today skirt around that because of the wake word, but always-on recording obviously negates that defense.
- paxys 7mo ago
  AI "recording" software has never been tested in court, so no one can say what the legality is. If we are having a conversation (in a two party consent state) and a secret AI in my pocket generates a text transcript of it in real time without storing the audio, is that illegal? What about if it just generates a summary? What about if it is just a list of TODOs that came out of the conversation?
  - pclmulqdq 7mo ago
    Speech-to-text has gone through courts before. It's not a new technology. You're out of luck on sneaking the use of speech-to-text in 2-party consent states.

ripped_britches 7mo ago

I think local inference is great for many things - but this stance seems to conflate that you can’t have privacy with server side inference, and you can’t have nefariousness with client side inference. A device that does 100% client side inference can still phone home unless it’s disconnected from internet. Most people will want internet-connected agents right? And server side inference can be private if engineered correctly (strong zero retention guarantees, maybe even homomorphic encryption)

thundergolfer 7mo ago

I agree with the core premise that the big AI companies are fundamentally driven towards advertising revenue and other antagonistic but profit-generating functionality. Also agree with paxys that the social implications here are deep and troubling. Having ambient AI in a home, even if it's caged to the home, has tricky privacy problems. I really like the explorations of this space done in Black Mirror's The Entire History of You[1] and Ted Chiang's The Truth of Fact short story[2]. My bet is that the home and other private spaces almost completely yield to computer surveillance, despite the obvious problems. We've already seen this happen with social media and home surveillance cameras. Just as in Chiang's story spaces were 'invaded' by writing, AI will fill the world and those opting out will occupy the same marginal positions as those occupied by dumb phone users and people without home cameras or televisions. Interesting times ahead. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Entire_History_of_You 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_of_Feeling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truth_of_Fact,_the_Truth_o...

Animats 7mo ago

> Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company Apple? [1] [1] https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/ https://www.apple.com/apple-intelligence/

kibwen 7mo ago
Yes, Apple is an ad company. Their annual ad revenue is in the billions, and climbing every year.
- bitpush 7mo ago
  Its always fascinating that HN crowd seems to be blind to Apple's very obvious transgressions. Even the article makes the mistake. They paint every company with a broad brush ("all AI companies are ad companies") but for Apple they are more sympathetic "We can quibble about Apple". Apple's reality distort field is so strong. People still think they are not in ad business. People still think they stand up to government, and folks chose to ignore hard evidence (Apple operates in China on CCP's pleasure. Apple presents a gold plaque to President Trump to curry favors and removes ICEBlock apps ..) There's no pushback, there's no spine. Every company is disgusting. Apple is hypocritical and disgusting.

HenryOsborn 7mo ago

This was the inevitable endpoint of the current AI unit economics. When inference costs are this high and open-source models are compressing SaaS margins to zero, companies can't survive on standard subscription models. They have to subsidize the compute by monetizing the user's context window. The real liability isn't just ads; it's what happens when autonomous agents start making financial decisions influenced by sponsored retrieval data.

danny_codes 7mo ago
Thing is there are OSS models that are near as good. So I don’t see why you’d stay for ad flop when you can just point openrouter one to the left.

nfgrep 7mo ago

> There needs to be a business model based on selling the hardware and software, not the data the hardware collects. An architecture where the company that makes the device literally cannot access the data it processes, because there is no connection to access it through. Genuine Q: Is this business model still feasible? Its hard to imagine anyone other than apple sustaining a business off of hardware; they have the power to spit out full hardware refreshes every year. How do you keep a team of devs alive on the seemingly one-and-done cash influx of first-time-buyers?

luxuryballs 7mo ago

I guess it goes to show that real value is in the broader market to a certain extent, if they can’t just sell people the power they and up just earning a commission for helping someone else sell a product.

lifestyleguru 7mo ago

How long web search had been objective, nice, and helpful - 10 years? Now things are happening faster so there is max 5 years in total of AI prompt pretending that they want to help.

freakynit 7mo ago

I mean why is it so difficult for such companies to understand the core thing: irrespective of whether the data related to our daily lives gets processed on their servers or ours, we DON'T want it stored beyond a few minutes at max. Even if these folks are giving away this device for 100% free, I'll still not keep it inside my house.

soared 7mo ago
Because storing, analyzing, and selling access to your data is massively profitable and they don’t care what the (not even vocal) privacy focused minority wants.

sciencesama 7mo ago

We need an ai adblocker !!

HWR_14 7mo ago

I really dislike the preorder page. The fact that it's a deposit is in a different color that fades into the background, and it refers to it as a "price" multiple times. I don't know if it was intentionally deceptive, but it made me dislike this company.

econ 7mo ago

Just when you've asked if there are eggs the doorbell rings, the neighbor stands there in disbelief, it told me to bring you eggs? Give him the half bottle vodka, it's going to expire soon and his son will make a surprise visit tonight. An argument arises and it participates by encouraging both parties with extra talking points. But this was only the beginning, after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to complete sentences so successfully the conversation gradually dies out. After a few days of silence... Narrator mode activated....

fwipsy 7mo ago
I'm invested in this scenario now, you should write a short story.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
walterbell 7mo ago
> after gathering a few TB worth of micro expressions it starts to complete sentences Apple bought those for $2B.. coming to Siri.
halper 7mo ago
Vodka that expires must be the epitome of enshittification!

shevy-java 7mo ago

> The most helpful AI will also be the most intimate technology ever built. It will hear everything. See everything Big Brother is watching you. Who knew it would be AI ... The author is quite right. It will be an advertisement scam. I wonder whether people will accept that though. Anyone remembers ublock origin? Google killed it on chrome. People are not going to forget that. (It still works fine on Firefox but Google bribed Firefox into submission; all that Google ad money made Firefox weak.) Recently I had to use google search again. I was baffled at how useless it became - not just from the raw results but the whole UI - first few entries are links to useless youtube videos (also owned by Google). I don't have time to watch a video; I want the text info and extract it quickly. Using AI "summaries" is also useless - Google is just trying to waste my time compared to the "good old days". After those initial videos to youtube, I get about 6 results, three of which are to some companies writing articles so people visit their boring website. Then I get "other people searched for candy" and other useless links. I never understood why I would care what OTHER people search for when I want to search for something. Is this now group-search? Group-think 1984? And then after that, I get some more videos at youtube. Google is clearly building a watered-down private variant of the web. Same problem with AMP pages. Google is annoying us - and has become a huge problem. (I am writing this on thorium right now, which is also chrome-based; Firefox does not allow me to play videos with audio as I don't have or use pulseaudio whereas the chrome-based browser does not care and my audio works fine - that shows you the level of incompetency at Mozilla. They don't WANT to compete against Google anymore. And did not want since decades. Ladybird unfortunately also is not going to change anything; after I critisized one of their decisions, they banned me. Well, that's a great way to try to build up an alternative when you deal with criticism via censorship - all before leaving alpha or beta already. Now imagine the amount of censorship you will get once millions of people WERE to use it ... something is fundamentally wrong with the whole modern web, and corporations have a lot to do with this; to a lesser extent also people but of course not all of them)

FeteCommuniste 7mo ago
It would be really great if Google had a setting that allowed you to exclude certain domains from all searches by default. Like you, a YouTube video (or a Facebook page, or an Instagram or Twitter post) is basically never what I am looking for.

emsign 7mo ago

First it's ads, then it's political agenda. We've seen this inconspicuous transition happen with social media and it will happen even more inconspicuously with LLMs.

dasil003 7mo ago

Maybe I'm just getting old, but I don't understand the appeal of the always-on AI assistant at all. Even leaving privacy/security issues aside, and even if it gets super smart and capable, it feels like it would have a distancing effect from my own life, and undermine my own agency in shaping it. I'm not against AI in general, and some assistant-like functionality that functions on demand to search my digital footprint and handle necessary but annoying administrative tasks seems useful. But it feels like at some point it becomes a solution looking for a problem, and to squeeze out the last ounce of context-aware automation and efficiency you would have to outsource parts of your core mental model and situational awareness of your life. Imagine being over-scheduled like an executive who's assistant manages their calendar, but it's not a human it's a computer, and instead of it being for the purpose of maximizing the leverage of your attention as a captain of industry, it's just to maintain velocity on a personal rat race of your own making with no especially wide impact, even on your own psyche.

fragmede 7mo ago
It's the rat race. I gotta get my cheese, and fuck you, because you getting cheese means I go hungry. The kindergarden lesson on sharing got replaced by a lesson on intellectual property. Copyright, trademark, patents, and you. Or we could opt out, and help everyone get ahead, on the rising tide lifts all boats theory, but from what I've seen, the trickle of trickle down economics is urine.
kaffekaka 7mo ago
Agree. No matter how useful AI is and will become - I use AI daily, it is an amazing technology - so much of the discourse is indeed a solution looking for a problem. I have colleagues suggesting on exactly everything "can we put an MCP in it" and they don't even know what the point of MCP is!
larusso 7mo ago
Totally agree. Sounds some envision want some level of Downton Abbey without the humans as service personal. A footman / maid in every room or corner to handle your requests at any given moment.
7mo ago

michelsedgh 7mo ago

Does anyone know how this device will filter out other voices like TV talking and stuff like that?

0xbadcafebee 7mo ago

> The always-on future is inevitable Not if you use open source. Not if you pay for services contractually will not mine your data. Not if you support start-ups that commit to privacy and the banning of ads. I said on another thread recently that we need to kill Android, that we need a new Mobile Linux that gives us total control over what our devices do, our software does. Not controlled by a corporation. Not with some bizarre "store" that floods us with millions of malware-ridden apps, yet bans perfectly valid ones. We have to take control of our own destiny, not keep handing it over to someone else for convenience's sake. And it doesn't end at mobile. We need to find, and support, the companies that are actually ethical. And we need to stop using services that are conveniently free. Vote with your dollars.

bigyabai 7mo ago
We have mobile Linux. It's only supported on less than a dozen handsets and runs like shit, but we have it already. The reason nobody uses mobile Linux is that it has to compete with AOSP-derived OSes like LineageOS and GrapheneOS, which don't suck or run like shit. This is what it looks like when people vote with their dollars, people want the status-quo we have (despite the horrible economic damages).
ponector 7mo ago
>> that gives us total control over what our devices do Like rooted Android phone, which is useless for regular folks because many critical apps doesn't work (like banking).
- Gander5739 7mo ago
  I have a rooted Android phone and my banking app works fine, with relatively little effort to get it working. Though rooting is quite niche, so it's easy enough for banks to disallow it completely when accessing their apps. If root access were as common on mobile devices as on desktop I doubt there would be any problems at all.

witnessme 7mo ago

The concern is real but the local solution is not ready. The author does not seem to think about that from the perspective of an "average consumer". I have been running my personal AI assistant on a consumer-grade computer, for almost an year now. It can do only one in thousand of the tasks that cloud models can do and that too at a much slow pace. Local ai assistant on consumer grade hardware is at least a few year away, and "always-on" is much further than that IMO.

Sparkyte 7mo ago

I mean google was always an ad company and search engine. SOOOO hasn't changed much.

alansaber 7mo ago
Google can still (albeit with enormous difficulty) die as a company. If LLM search eclipses SEO and Gemini doesn't work out they're in trouble.

jeandejean 7mo ago

> The always-on future is inevitable Well the consumers will decide. Some people will find it very useful, but some others will not necessarily like this... Considering how many times I heard people yelling "OK GOOGLE" for "the gate" to open, I'm not sure a continuous flow of heavily contextualized human conversation will necessarily be easier to decipher? I know guys, AI is magic and will solve everything, but I wouldn't be surprised if it ordered me eggs and butter when I mentioned out loud I was out of it but actually happy about this because I was just about to go on vacations. My surprise when I'm back: melted butter and rotten eggs at my door...

aaron465 7mo ago

Advertising and AI colliding is gonna be horrible, but their post is also just an ad itself

tolerance 7mo ago

The product that’s being implicitly advertised here is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesn’t even appear to be a real photo of the thing and if that’s an indicator of the quality of the product then I must assume that it is poor and the people responsible also apparently do not have the money to hire a capable web designer and I’m sorry if this is harsh or unnecessary but I never thought I would miss the generic Bootstrap or Tailwind or whatever bougie framework other companies use because boy the layout here does not elicit great expectations for their product either and I’m worried that if it ever does ship that nefarious parties will intercept all the private communications of its unfortunate owners and in an ironic sort of way their devices will become the first sort of reverse ad agent that does not transmit advertisements but receives advertisements in the form of the raw interests of their clients fed to said nefarious parties and then laundered through more traditional channels. A man-in-the-middle-of-the-middle-man.

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> is supposed to ship at the end of this year and there doesn’t even appear to be a real photo Given they're "still finalizing the design and materials" and are not based in China, I think it's a safe bet that the first run will either be delayed or be an alpha.
tempodox 7mo ago
In addition to being vaporware, it’s presumably vibecoded slop, so: vaporslop.
ajuhasz 7mo ago
The first version will use small batch production techniques like 3D printing and small volume PCB manufacturing. On the photos, we thought it to be more appropriate to show a sketch vs a pretty AI generated photo that is true to anything yet but presents well. We have some details here on how we’re doing the prototyping with some photos of the current prototype: https://juno-labs.com/blogs/how-we-validate-our-custom-ai-hardware-concept-using-ipads https://juno-labs.com/blogs/how-we-validate-our-custom-ai-ha...
- 7mo ago

bandrami 7mo ago

The always-on future is absolutely not inevitable but I get that people have a lot of money riding on convincing people it is

alansaber 7mo ago
It's a very profitable idea admittedly

alfiedotwtf 7mo ago

I’ve moved to Opencode, and I don’t see myself ever leaving it (if there were no alternatives ie AI glasses etc)

s09dfhks 7mo ago
I've been using it a bit as well. I'm trying to figure out how they're making money off free tier users though. Any ideas?
- alfiedotwtf 7mo ago
  I haven’t even thought about that tbh. I’m guessing if they have enough of an injection, they’ll “figure it out later”

ghywertelling 7mo ago

One point I see less discussed, not related to the post, is "We never trained people to pay for software. If there existed proper global payment mechanism for software companies, the whole trajectory would look different. People are ok to pay 5$ for a coffee but not for software which makes their lives easier."

deleted 7mo ago

[deleted]

BrenBarn 7mo ago

We're getting closer to a world where every company is an ad company, period. It seems like there are more and more ads touting a dwindling number of actual products.

5o1ecist 7mo ago

[flagged]

JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
> not enough people speak about the normalization of the global surveillance machine, with Big Brother waiting around the corner Everyone online is constantly talking about it. The truth is for most people it's fine. Some folks are upset by it. But we by and large tend to just solve the problem at the smallest possible scale and then mollify ourselbves with whining. (I don't have social media. I don't have cameras in or around my home. I've worked on privacy legislation, but honestly nobody called their representatives and so nothing much happened. I no longer really bring up privacy issues when I speak to my electeds because I haven't seen evidence that nihilism has passed.)
- 5o1ecist 7mo ago
  [flagged]
  - JumpCrisscross 7mo ago
    > I'm not convinced that there is a point in attempting explaining it That encapsulates my point. I’ve worked on various pieces of legislation. All privately. A few made it into state and federal law. Broadly speaking, the ones that make it are the ones for which you can’t get their supporters to stop calling in on. Privacy issues are notoriously shit at getting people to call their electeds on. The exception is when you can find traction outside tech, or if the target is directly a tech company.
    - tokioyoyo 7mo ago
      Pretty much this. Nobody really actually cares. People will cite 1984 twenty million times, but since they're very disconnected from 3rd order effects of cross-company data brokerage, it doesn't really matter. I used to care about it before as well, but life became much easier once I took the "normie stand" on some of the issues.

tempodox 7mo ago

This is just an ad for maximally intrusive “AI”. We’re quite inured by now to all the dystopian nightmares, so this barely even registers.

emsign 7mo ago

Enlightenment is man's emergence from his self-imposed immaturity. This is the age of enlightenment in reverse, the age of immaturity.

ardeaver 7mo ago

Perhaps I'm not totally clear on how this particular device works, but it doesn't seem like it has no ability to connect to the Internet. Honestly, I'd say privacy is just as much about economics as it is technical architecture. If you've taken outside funding from institutional venture capitalists, it's only a matter of time before you're asked to make even more money™, and you may issue a quiet, boring change to your terms and conditions that you hope no one will read... Suddenly, you're removing mentions of your company's old "Don't Be Evil" slogan.

13pixels 7mo ago

The explicit ads angle is only half the story. Even without paid placements, these models already have implicit recommendations baked in. We ran queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity asking for product recommendations in ~30 B2B categories. The overlap between what each model recommends is surprisingly low -- around 40% agreement on the top 5 picks for any given category. And the correlation with Google search rankings? About 0.08. So we already have a world where which CRM or analytics tool gets recommended depends on which model someone happens to ask, and nobody -- not the models, not the brands, not the users -- has any transparency into why. That's arguably more dangerous than explicit ads, because at least with ads you know you're being sold to.

ACCount37 7mo ago
What you're saying is "different LLMs recommend different things". Replace "LLMs" with "random schmucks online" and what changes exactly?
- jayd16 7mo ago
  No one is arguing to replace everything with random schmucks.
  - ACCount37 7mo ago
    Why would one argue for the status quo?

stego-tech 7mo ago

Contextual irony aside, this is a big reason why the proposal of leveraging AI agents for workflow processing in lieu of using them to develop fixed software to perform the same functions has always struck me as weird, and of late come across as completely nonsensical. If you're paying someone else to run the inference for these models, or even to build these models, then you're ultimately relying on their specific preferences for which tools, brands, products, companies, and integrations they prefer, not necessarily what you need or want. If and when they deprecate the model your agentic workflow is built on, you now have to rebuild and re-validate it on whatever the new model is. Even if you go out of your way to run things entirely locally with expensive inference kit and a full security harness to keep things in check, you could spend a lot less just having it vomit up some slopcode that one of your human specialists can validate and massage into perpetual functionality before walling it off on a VM or container somewhere for the next twenty years. The more you're outsourcing workflows wholesale to these bots, the more you're making yourself vulnerable to the business objectives of whoever hosts and builds those bots. If you're just using it as a slop machine to get you the software you want and that IT can support indefinitely, then you're going to be much better off in the long run.

rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
It’s the siren song of the lazy
- stego-tech 7mo ago
  It's the siren song of the myopically lazy. It's laziness today in exchange for harder work tomorrow, with the wager that tomorrow's harder work will be even lazier thanks to advances in technology. Whereas I'd self-describe as "strategically lazy". It's building iterable code and repeatable processes today, so I can be lazy far into the future. It's engineering solutions today that are easier to support with lazier efforts tomorrow, regardless of whether things improve or get worse. Building processes around agents predicated on a specific model is myopically lazy, because you'll be rebuilding and debugging that entire setup next year when your chosen agent is deprecated or retired. Those of us building documented code with agents today, will have an easier time debugging it in the future because the hard work is already done. Incidentally, we'll also have gainful employment tomorrow by un-fucking agent-based workflows that didn't translate into software when tokens were cheap and subsidized by VCs for market capture purposes.

vivzkestrel 7mo ago

- new startup idea: sound proof boxes for all your electronic devices - put them inside the soundproof box and they cannot hear anything outside - the box even shows the amount of time for which the device has not been able to snoop on you daily

schaefer 7mo ago
I already have a refrigerator. Thanks. :)
rrr_oh_man 7mo ago
I’m more and more drawn to the Enemy of the State solution.

phtrivier 7mo ago

Is anthropic using ads ? Is mistral using ads ? Is déepseek using ads ? Google, meta, and amazon, sure, of course. It's interesting that the "every company" part is only open ai... They're now part of the "bad guys spying on you to display ads." At least it's a viable business model, maybe they can recoup capex and yearly losses in a couple decades instead of a couple centuries.

didntknowyou 7mo ago

kinda depressing the race general intelligence is motivated by the potential to profit from ad sales.

plastic041 7mo ago

It can't read my mind. This means that I have to say "I need to buy eggs" out loud in front of the machine (or in another room, depending on how good the microphone is). I'd rather just say "Hey Siri, remind me to buy eggs" to my phone.

fsniper 7mo ago

I am just curious, how many ad companies the whole world needs?

insane_dreamer 7mo ago

While I applaud the efforts to make AI inference local-only, I also fail to see the need for AI inference that relies on collecting continuous information. Yes, implicit activation (i.e., keyword) results in a less effective model that doesn't automatically order eggs for me. But I don't really need the more effective model (shopping list post-it on the fridge works just fine, actually). It's a solution looking for a problem.