I’ve been confused about why we have seen hardware AI products pop up. Earlier this year there was quite a lot of buzz around the Rabbit r1. The fun design from teenage engineering together with hitting the peak of the AI hype made me interested. Even though I wasn’t super excited about buying it or really understood what it was for I wanted to know more.
The AI pin was another product that was insanely hyped at the beginning of the year. It’s a small device that you can attach to your shirt. It functions as an assistant who can help you remember things, put things in the calendar, buy things.
The AI pin blew up in a spectacular way with a review from Markus. It even started a discourse about if the reviewers have a responsibility to not make to harsh a review since it can kill a company before they even get started. (My worry is that reviewers get even more gagged than they already are. They should be critical and guide consumers to good purchases. The critique came mostly from, by what I saw, the type of tech optimist that I mostly see on twitter. If a company don’t think the product is ready then they should hold the release until it is. And trust me I know that is a hard decision to make but I they don’t they shouldn’t be surprised when their stock tanks.). The Rabbit was less dramatic but it didn’t escape harsh reviews and also got a lot of flack when it came to light that the people behind it were NFT and crypto grifters that had pivoted to AI last year.
Both these events left me thinking “Why?”. And there were so many why’s: Why did they decide to build a Hardware product in the first place? Why did they decide to release them when they were so underperforming? Why did so many people think it was such a good idea? Why are we so excited for “assistants”?
There is a really funny clip from one reviewer of the rabbit where they talk about how they would redesign it. First they would remove the jockey wheel, then they would make it smaller with the edge all he way to the screen… by the end they have a smartphone with a rabbit logo. I was thinking the same thing. I wondered: If the selling point is the “assistant” functionality, which is all software, why go through the effort of making a hardware thing? Why not spend the time and money on building up the assistant capability which is not an easy thing to do and something they didn’t manage to take care of?
My half baked ideas for why:
Maybe they were hoping to make back some investment by the selling the hardware. They would sell the hardware with enough margin to give them cashflow while they continued building the software. The AI pin needs a subscription to work but the rabbit was sold as is with no mention of a subscription. I don’t know what their plan was since it seems like it would be hard to maintain growth (because lets be clear that these companies where built on the Silicon Valley model of funding that require exponential growth. Or maybe the rabbit wasn’t, I’ve no idea what their business plan looks like, but I wonder where they got the funding from if it wants this model) by selling a 200$ gadget.
The second reason I can think of is that they wanted to build some kind of a moat. With Google, OpenAI, Meta, as well as newer companies like Hugging Face and Anthropic all building foundational models and the infrastructure to build solutions on top of them (like GPTs, Agents, RAGs) it will be hard to compete. You can try to build an assistant, which is close to the standard chat interface of these models, and fight against some of the biggest companies in the world to create a better product. Or maybe you build a hardware gadget that can be used to access these models. Maybe the form factor of your hardware is so nice to use that customers stay with your gadget and pay to allow their assistant to be housed in it… Was that the bet? Its really hard to build a product category.
Maybe the simple reason is that it is much easier to sell a device to an end customer than a subscription? People are reluctant to pay for software and it is much easer to sell B2B solutions. But a device might make people open their wallet? Maybe this is not Spotify, it is a vinyl record that you can hold and display and show your friends?
I mean, I get it. I have a bunch of things I would like to get done and it would be great if someone could them for me. The thing is that most of the things I personally want to get done you need a body to do. I need to do the dishes and put away the laundry, the living room could use some tidying up. At most an AI assistant can assist me by making a TODO list.
What about the things you do online? I’m not happy about letting my browser know my location, handing over my login information to companies that recently was deeply involved with crypto seems like a bad idea. I don’t think they have my best interest in mind. Since I struggle to make it through buying a plane ticket without adding extra costs you might understand why I wouldn't want an AI to pay my bills in 2024. I require a lot more hands on control. Did we, collectively, think that the AIs would be so good during this year that we would be happy to let them handle our online accounts?
There are quite a few companies that have started selling automated messages for social media accounts. But that is mostly for business accounts or a personal account that is run like a business. The type of account where you need to post several times a day to stay relevant. It’s very different from the personal, private, assistant that the AI pin and Rabbit R1 claim to be.
The reason I started writing this post was because I read this blog about “Complicated Sticks”. The theses is that these hardware assistants are a type of complicated stick. You could potentially do anything with a stick. The potential is the attractive part. You are buying the potential to have a magic stick that can help you book a trip, not the actual ability to do it.
"This is the trend of making what I call complicated sticks. Complicated sticks are complex tech products that are useful for everything and nothing in particular. Evident in these wispy ads that try to give a blanket impression of good vibes and positivity that’s more suited to fashion, fragrances, and marketing within flooded product categories, not supposedly innovative tech that helps us do things we couldn’t do before."
Faster & WorseWhen thinking about this topic I keep returning to the concept of blunt and sharp end I wrote about a while ago. I find it very helpful to categorize the products (or really the rhetoric surrounding the products) into blunt and sharp end. A sharp end product is something that helps an expert to get marginally better. It addresses a concrete use-case or pain point that a person skilled in that domain have. From the blunt end you dont have visibility of what their jobs even is, complicated sticks sounds like a good idea. When we consider an AI hardware assistant I think we are operating in a blunt end mode.
Hardware AI products leave baffled. I’m really not sure what happened and what we can learn from this. I mostly have questions.