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OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

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51–60 of 105 posts

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#51

Man, I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to come up with. Titanium AIPods. Non-detachable alluminum RayBans. Google Glass, but it's a literal Black Mirror worn on your face. Self-driving Segway. Transparent plastic smart lunchbox. Electric long-board that's also a tablet. Fist-mountable selfdefense impact jackhammer. 5G base station Zurb ball. A keyboard that starts repeating nnnn when you think of what…

Plot twist. He is Ive.... or a very good ai representation.

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#52
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was this device in Neeuromancer. Like a small stone, you touch it and can talk to AI in your head. That’d be awesome.

Ya. Even a limited use AirPod-as-language-translator-in-real-time could be a good use of technology (something like this was in Hitchhiker's Guide and many other sci-fi). The leap in AI skill to trust translations more could enable the leap from looking at a phone to just having a bug in your ear.

Interestingly there's already an AI powered earbud [0] on the market that claims to do that; whether it's any good or if OpenAI can do better remains to be seen.

But how long before it's capturing audio from your conversations to use as training data?

[0] https://www.timekettle.co/

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#54

Man, I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to come up with. Titanium AIPods. Non-detachable alluminum RayBans. Google Glass, but it's a literal Black Mirror worn on your face. Self-driving Segway. Transparent plastic smart lunchbox. Electric long-board that's also a tablet. Fist-mountable selfdefense impact jackhammer. 5G base station Zurb ball. A keyboard that starts repeating nnnn when you think of what…

Yes, you CAN begin to imagine what they're going to come up with!

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#55
post #25

What the hell is an "AI device"? Unless we're talking robotics, I don't see why you would need a separate device for AI. Seems like we already have all the right form factors (phones, speakers, etc). This reminds me of when Facebook tried to make a Facebook phone. Turned out iPhones and Androids were significantly better as phones and they could do Facebook just fine.

The very real leaks that I’ve very really seen suggest it’s a bit like HAL-3000 with an upgraded bezel-less Retina display red orb that goes all the way to the diamond-cut chamfered edges, but when you ask it to do something instead of saying “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave” it starts playing latter-day U2 albums.

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#56
post #4

For hardware devices that raised >$100mm before launch, how have they gone? Successes: * Tesla Non-successes: * Magic Leap * Juicero * Nuro * Segway What else am I missing? I suspect there are other successes that raised >$100mm pre-launch that I'm not thinking of. I wonder why they wouldn't start smaller. That said, I still expect they'll succeed, and I hope they succeed. I don't believe in any rules of thumb, great…

If you had invested $1B in each of those 5 companies, you would probably still have made a great return, now that Tesla is at $770B.

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#57
post #25

What the hell is an "AI device"? Unless we're talking robotics, I don't see why you would need a separate device for AI. Seems like we already have all the right form factors (phones, speakers, etc). This reminds me of when Facebook tried to make a Facebook phone. Turned out iPhones and Androids were significantly better as phones and they could do Facebook just fine.

I always love reading myopic technology takes on this site.

Based on the article, it sounds like they're in exploratory talks to figure out what that "AI device" could be. I agree that it's likely we've already figured out the right form factors for such a device, but it's not a leap to imagine a significantly better UX than what we have from today's computing devices.

The movie "Her" seems like a decent blueprint for a post-smartphone "AI device".

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#58
post #25

What the hell is an "AI device"? Unless we're talking robotics, I don't see why you would need a separate device for AI. Seems like we already have all the right form factors (phones, speakers, etc). This reminds me of when Facebook tried to make a Facebook phone. Turned out iPhones and Androids were significantly better as phones and they could do Facebook just fine.

If they can come up with an Alexa/Siri kind of experience that doesn’t make me want to throw it out the window, I can see the separate device not being too hard of a sell, while at the same time avoiding being at the mercy of whichever device provider they would have to play along with otherwise.

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#59
post #36

Man, I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to come up with. Titanium AIPods. Non-detachable alluminum RayBans. Google Glass, but it's a literal Black Mirror worn on your face. Self-driving Segway. Transparent plastic smart lunchbox. Electric long-board that's also a tablet. Fist-mountable selfdefense impact jackhammer. 5G base station Zurb ball. A keyboard that starts repeating nnnn when you think of what…

If you're this good when trolling for 5 minutes, I would be amazed to see you work seriously. Honestly some of those ideas are... terrible, of course, but awesome in their own distorted way. And also very Ive-like. Bravo, sir.

Just imagine a Ive-designed retina-scanning-orb! Easily worth a billion to SoftBank, easily!

Re: OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture

#60
post #25

What the hell is an "AI device"? Unless we're talking robotics, I don't see why you would need a separate device for AI. Seems like we already have all the right form factors (phones, speakers, etc). This reminds me of when Facebook tried to make a Facebook phone. Turned out iPhones and Androids were significantly better as phones and they could do Facebook just fine.

If they can come up with an Alexa/Siri kind of experience that doesn’t make me want to throw it out the window, I can see the separate device not being too hard of a sell, while at the same time avoiding being at the mercy of whichever device provider they would have to play along with otherwise.

Of course Alexa is getting a LLM as announced recently in the next few weeks. I don’t think Amazon and Apple are going to miss the bandwagon.

On the Apple front they added a very small LLM to the keyboard autocorrect that is better at semantically correcting and predicting what you’re writing in iOS 17. It’s a ducking lot better already, but I imagine over the years it’ll round out to be incredibly useful.

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