The onrushing AI era was supposed to create boom times for great gadgets. Not long ago, analysts were predicting that Apple Intelligence would start a “supercycle” of smartphone upgrades, with tons of new AI features compelling people to buy them. Amazon and Google and others were explaining how their ecosystems of devices would make computing seamless, natural, and personal. Startups were flooding the market with ChatGPT-powered gadgets, so you’d never be out of touch. AI was going to make every gadget great, and every gadget was going to change to embrace the AI world.
This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.
There was just one problem with the whole theory: the tech still doesn’t work. Chatbots may be fun to talk to and an occasionally useful replacement for Google, but truly game-changing virtual assistants are nowhere close to ready. And without them, the gadget revolution we were promised has utterly failed to materialize.
In the meantime, the tech industry allowed itself to be so distracted by these shiny language models that it basically stopped trying to make otherwise good gadgets. Some companies have more or less stopped making new things altogether, waiting for AI to be good enough before it ships. Others have resorted to shipping more iterative, less interesting upgrades because they have run out of ideas other than “put AI in it.” That has made the post-ChatGPT product cycle bland and boring, in a moment that could otherwise have been incredibly exciting. AI isn’t good enough, and it’s dragging everything else down with it.
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I mean…. Anyone could have told you that.
Some More News had the right take on this: all these companies just dumped (either in investment or development) (hundreds of) billions of dollars into AI development.
The problem is, we’re still 10-15 years away from AI being actually useful in gadgets and stuff. But these companies want to get paid now, so they’re shoving the cheapest, shittiest “functional” AI onto the market just to try and recoup some losses. And it’s painfully apparent it isn’t working.
The this isn’t on topic necessarily but if you wanna know what they are betting on for ai look into contentcyborg.ai
They wanna flood the internet with fake people, opinions, engagement etc. This creates a feedback loop of marketing budgets flooding social media for the engagement frenzy and creating ideological Dutch disease where anything will be said for a buck. We’re already there obviously culture wise, but now we’re offshoring fake souls I guess.
Just look at how ppl use their smart speakers. They ask it to set timers or ask for the weather. AI will be the norm once the benefit is obvious to everyone. When I can trust my AI with my credit card info and allow it to purchase stuff for me. Right now AI is basically a self-organizing dictionary which is often confidently incorrect. Not once has GPT told me it didn’t know something.
This whole promise hinged on the idea that Siri, Alexa, Gemini, ChatGPT, and other chatbots had gotten so good, they’d change how we do everything. Typing and tapping would soon be passé, all replaced by multimodal, omnipresent AI helpers. You wouldn’t need to do things yourself; you’d just tell your assistant what you need, and it would tap into the whole world of apps and information to do it for you. Tech companies large and small have been betting on virtual assistants for more than a decade, to little avail. But this new generation of AI was going to change things.
I have never and will never interact with my phone by speaking to it and I don’t want to be around other people who are doing that. The beauty of a touch screen and buttons is you can silently operate the device. Software can always be updated. They should be focusing on hardware features if they want to be innovative. Maybe they could start by adding back some of the shit they’ve removed.
the bar is so low that even a lean secure android OS without bloatware would be revolutionary.
I agree but I suspect that the problem is that people have different opinions on where the line is on that. Presumably somebody, somewhere actually plays that stupid candy crush thing on Windows for example. It’s probably a ‘valuable service’ for it to be pre installed for them.
I kinda hate them but they’re allowed to like it.
I could live with pre installed apps as long as they can be removed… i remember having useless apps like google music, youtube, weird browsers and other random apps that could not be removed, I could only uninstall the updates but the base version would remain… That stuff is predatory if i do not use them why should i be forced to have them on my phone.
Yup. I remember when the iPhone first appeared, my first one was the 3GS and they had so much pre-installed nonsense. It’s very frustrating.
Generations* Let’s not forget we produce 3 or 4 models of phones a year, per manufacturer. That’s an alarming planet amount of E-waste and we don’t have the raw materials to keep up this pace forever.
My iPhone 14 Pro has no AI and still works as wonderfully well as it did the first day I bought it. And I know that on iOS, you can simply disable the AI element.
But, yeah, the “promise of AI” was always bullshit.
Someone should just sue Apple for false advertising at this point. Apple “Intelligence” is utterly useless in its current form.
But it can make custom emoji! 🫨 That alone is worth the hundreds of millions Apple spent.
Even for devices that will stand the test of time on their own, they’re still being unnecessarily modified by the addition of extra nonsense to support AI boondoggles.
I was talking to our company’s account manager from one major PC manufacturer, he agreed that a generation of laptops with a likely-to-be-useless-in-future Copilot button permanently emblazoned on their keyboard will really date this era.
The computers themselves will be fine - they have some extraneous hardware but that doesn’t really detract from their usability - but there’s a better than even chance that logo will exist as a reminder long after memories of what it was supposedly for begin to fade.
A whole generation of basically disposable devices at that
I just don’t get why they haven’t put AI in the already established ‘assistants’ yet.
Why isn’t siri or google home not integrated? Why make new things instead of improving the tech you already have?
If I had to guess, its either because of branding, or because they know it doesn’t work that well yet. Probably both.
This has been a huge let down. Thought at the very least home assistants which are marginally useful could become less infuriating with an intelligence boost, but not at all. I’d be happy if I could simply upload a damn 64 Kb thesaurus at this point to my alexa so she would not ignore everything I say if I don’t remember the exact right commands.
Sounds like you should check out Homeassistant.
Home assistant is currently in development for their own prebuilt ‘Alexas’. But they are only in their ‘preview’ stage for selected devs and influencers. No announced target date when it is commercially available.
There is a hat for the raspberry pi that does local voice recognition that you can use with Rhasspy or another setup.
But, I haven’t really messed with it since they started rolling out voice recognition within HA. My plans for a HAL9000 system are on pause until I finish my microchip pet feeding enclosures project.
Yeah maybe. Switching infrastructure would be a headache and expensive though. Last I checked the off the shelf versions which is how I would want to start at least didn’t have wifi capability. Is there a turnkey version that does now?
Yeah, ODROID partnered with them to create an off the shelf product. It’s pretty pricy, though, but honestly you could run it on a pi 3b+ for pretty cheap.
- It doesnt work that well.
- If they do that then they cant trick everyone into buying new devices, thus helping recoup the untold billions dumped into LLM-based content theft.
AI is about as useful as when there was a movement to take away human assistants to troubleshoot issues and replacing them all with centralized hubs. These hubs are built with the assumption that they will answer everything and anything people have a concern with. However, their fundamental flaw is that they don’t cover every base and people are left with limited options. They can forget it and just live with it. They can just go through a few more hoops until they’re talking with a human.
And this kind of over-reliance on AI is what will turn people off from it. I’m seeing AI implemented in places where nobody asked it for it to be implemented in. Whereas, there are missed opportunities for AI to be implemented in but aren’t for some reason.
AI in of itself isn’t an entirely bad thing. It is just once again, another great idea, ruined by blind executors in big tech that just don’t get it.
I’ve heard it put very well that AI is either having a Napster moment in which case we will not recognise the world 10 years from now, or it’s having an iPhone moment and it will get marginally better at best but is essentially in it’s final form.
I personally think it’s more like 3D movies and in 20 years when it comes back around we’ll look at this crap like it was Red and Blue glasses.
I think it’s iphone stage. We’ve had predictive text in some form or other for a long time now. But that’s just LLMs. Can’t speak for the image/video generators, but I expect those will become another tool in the box that gets better but does the same thing.
I just can’t see a whole lot of improvement in these products making any changes top how we use them already.
AI image generation is pretty cool. If it’s used in moderation and as a test bed. It’s a tool, not a complete piece of work imo.
I could see text gen being usful for some things. But i feel like it can very easily and sloppily be a crutch. If it’s used in the same spirit as a spreadsheet I’d feel better about it.
LLMs are just ridiculous to me.
I haven’t gotten anything of use from Apple Intelligence. Even just using it is difficult, and Siri is possibly dumber than she was before.
Based on what I’ve seen of my partners phone, it provides an assessment of text messages. Why would someone want that?
I’ve used the “writing tools” extensively for minor changes, like changes to capitalization on a large block of text. It makes the phone a little less of a consumption-only device.
I’ve also found the image editing tools handy from time to time, and the automatic calls to ChatGPT on the more complex natural-language questions can sometimes be handy, even if you need to wait a while for the response.
The notification summaries are sometimes very handy and sometimes absurdly incorrect and misleading.
I’m really looking forward to Siri being less frustratingly stupid, but we’ve got a while to wait for that, and we probably shouldn’t set our expectations too high. I do respect that they’ve not shipped it rather than shipping something broken, though.
siri has not been integrated with AI yet. they pushed that to 2026.
Honestly yeah, none of the crap being made right now is going to appear relevant in the future, just like 3d tvs
3d tvs is my favorite analogy. Easiest way to illustrate the bubble of hype.
That’s the saddest part, I loved my 3dtv until they stopped making media for it. It was a fun gimmick, but I was definitely not “most consumers” lol
