By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall

Welcome to the AI gadget era

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2024-04-03 12:30:06

By David Pierce , editor-at-large and Vergecast co-host with over a decade of experience covering consumer tech. Previously, at Protocol, The Wall Street Journal, and Wired.

I’m just going to call it: we’ll look back on April 2024 as the beginning of a new technological era. That sounds grandiose, I know, but in the next few weeks, a whole new generation of gadgets is poised to hit the market. Humane will launch its voice-controlled AI Pin. Rabbit’s AI-powered R1 will start to ship. Brilliant Labs’ AI-enabled smart glasses are coming out. And Meta is rolling out a new feature to its smart glasses that allow Meta’s AI to see and help you navigate the real world.

There are many more AI gadgets to come, but the AI hardware revolution is officially beginning. What all these gadgets have in common is that they put artificial intelligence at the front of the experience. When you tap your AI Pin to ask a question, play music, or take a photo, Humane runs your query through a series of language models to figure out what you’re asking for and how best to accomplish it. When you ask your Rabbit R1 or your Meta smart glasses who makes that cool mug you’re looking at, it pings through a series of image recognition and data processing models in order to tell you that’s a Yeti Rambler. AI is not an app or a feature; it’s the whole thing.

It’s possible that one or many of these devices will so thoroughly nail the user experience and feature list that this month will feel both like the day you got your first flip phone and the day the iPhone made that flip phone look like an antique. But probably not. More likely, what we’re about to get are a lot of new ideas about how you interact with technology. And together, they’ll show us at least a glimpse of the future.