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Comment by einsteinx2 | Hacker News Reader

I feel like we’ve had two already with the Rabbit R1 and Humane AI Pin. So many company got funded with obscene amounts of money though, so I think we still have dozens more coming soon. Though I imagine a lot of them will be quieter failures having not even gotten to a product launch yet.

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I don't think those are good examples, though. They were just ahead of their time, and poorly implemented. But an AI assistant that's accurate, immediately available, easier to use than a smartphone app, with better ergonomics, that integrates with other services ("agentic"), etc., is a billion-dollar idea. Someone will eventually crack this problem and produce a product that everyone will want. Just like Apple did with the iPhone, it will take a few years of lackluster products to get there. It's a matter of the tech getting good enough, affordable enough, and for someone to put the pieces together in the right package.

> accurate

Never gonna happen.

> easier to use than a smartphone app

Google is pushing their Gemini to Android phones pretty hard. I upgraded my phone yesterday and Gemini wanted to take over my power button (no way). What's going to be easier than that?

Not to mention that a phone screen provides a fast, efficient output that is good for vast amount of information -- text, image or video, etc. If I need to know local weather for the next 5 hours, a glance at the screen is much more efficient than waiting for AI to summarize that for me.

There are objectively situations where other widgets (and other ways to interact) can be helpful, e.g. if my hands are full of stuff, or when I am lying on my bed and too lazy to pick up my phone. But those situations are very limited. Amazon has learned the hard lesson that people don't really use Alexa other than a smart timer, after billions of dollars of investment. I don't see how that changes any time soon.

Sometimes you can't create a product that people want because there is simply no market at the time. Fit requires demand.

They were not ahead of their time, they were just hit by the limits of reality.

It will be a necessity for our current players to just have it.

Google, apple, Microsoft...

going on a tangent, but "AI pins" are in a similar position as VR headsets -- they are at best niche products in a very small market, and nowhere ready for mass adoption. People say Vision Pro is ahead of its time. No. It's a $3,500 gimmick that simply doesn't have a (real) use case.

AI pins lack any well functioning usecase, if any at all in my opinion, phone or smart watch makes more sense.

VR and AR headsets on the other hand have several good usecases, they just aren't for everyone.

Social VR, more fun exercise and the media watching experience is quite nice, especially on planes and in general nice on the Apple Vision Pro.

Those were special cases in that they were both AI startups and hardware startups, so double the doomed.

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