Anker made its own chip to bring AI to all its products

They've been first at a few things.

For instance: Back in the Bad, Old Days, charging phones (especially smart phones) wasn't quite as simple as today.

The aftermarket cables were shit. Brands came and went overnight (they still do, but they did then too), and even if a person eventually found some cables that worked then it was hard to get more of them later.

The aftermarket charging bricks were shit. I had some that would make capacitive touchscreens go crazy. Some that barely worked. Some that got stinky-hot.

The phone might have a USB port that looked about like all the others, but that didn't mean much: Different phone models had different ways for signalling/confirming/accepting charging capabilities, and they rarely lined up with the method a random charging brick used.

Get the wrong combination on this double-locked mystery box, and it was possible to plug a phone and have it say it is charging -- even though the reported battery SoC is dropping before your eyes.

That was the market. It was fragmented and dysfunctional, and the only sane method to simply charge a phone was to use OE cables with OE power bricks, for real money.

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Then Anker showed up, kind of out of nowwhere. And they were all like "Uh, guys? We sell stuff that actually works."

And they were right. They put together cables that consistently didn't suck (which should not be hard, except...). They started selling charging bricks that worked well with most or all of the phones on the market -- fooling them into thinking they were talking to their OE brick so they'd behave themselves.

It had been a terrible mess. A complete crapshoot.

And then, Anker products just plugged in and worked. They did all the things they said they'd do.

They did it so well that they raised the bar for the entire industry.

And, nowadays, it's not so bad. It's easy-enough to get a reliable cable or a charging brick that isn't a complete turd from a variety of names. That's not a thing that most of us think about much, if at all.

But man, it was fucked up for a long time before Anker stuff became common.

They make a lot of not-top-tier products. The products are usually quite good, but not the best. They're often the best value.

(Very happy with my $60 Anker earbuds).

Anker is a powerhouse and they've grown huge.

Best chargers on the market, hands down. Best cables too.

But they've gone into high end stuff. They make the Eufy brand of LiDAR smart vacuums for instance. All done in house, and consistently in the top rankings against market leaders like Roborock and Dreame.

They're killing it.

They're doing home security systems, and all sorts of stuff under the Eufy brand.

They are one of the main players in cords, chargers, power banks, robot vacuum cleaners, smart home devices, and headphones and earphones, and also make a bunch of other stuff. They have $4B annual revenue. Some things are under the Eufy brand.

Another +1 for Anker kit - ime it just works, is reasonably priced, and seems to last (I'm still using a 10 year old usb battery of theirs).

It's not entirely clear from the article but it sounds like Thus is either this chip or a series of chips that run low power neural nets with millions of parameters and they intend to use them for other applications in IoT devices.

It's a pretty central example of what we traditionally called AI before the term started being mostly used for LLMs.

> Traditional call noise canceling relies on those small onboard neural networks and can have difficulty isolating your voice in very noisy environments, which results in ambient noise leaking through or voices getting highly compressed, making it difficult to hear. Anker says the larger neural network available on the Thus chip, plus eight MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) microphones and two bone conduction sensors to focus in on your voice, in its yet-to-be-announced earbuds will have significantly cleaner call audio, regardless of the environment.

Anyone who likes good noise cancellation, which is a lot of people.

Back in the day we just called it ML. But now you have to stop for a minute to read and determine what they’re talking about, because “AI” is primarily a marketing term.

Early in the article it explains that these devices already had small neural nets on board. The advancement is that they can now put larger neural nets on board.

The best noise cancellation has to be adaptive. Neural nets help this work well. If making the product work well is "shoving it down your throat" then I don't know what to say.

The public presumably didn't hate the products before this chip and before knowing they had some form of AI on board.

> Anyway, time to find another peripherals vendor.

Why? You don't even understand what the AI functionality is for or the fact that it already existed. You just get triggered by reading articles like this?

According to the article, it's used for noise cancelling and calling that can better isolate voice from background noise. It's not an AI assistant or an LLM. These are totally different and the public's feelings on LLMs do not apply to their feelings on active noise cancelling.

They're not putting them on hubs and chargers, Anker make more than that. In the article it says that they're being used first in earbuds.

I distinctly remember a comment chain here, I think from last year, where someone made a remark they would never implement AI features, they wouldn't touch that tech "with a 10 foot pole" because of the public perception and backlash. Another comment immediately chimed in with skepticism about the general public having a negative view of AI.

I genuinely believe that the people pushing these features live in an algorithmic bubble. The internet supposedly connects us all, but I have to wonder how much hidden segregation goes on behind the scenes.

VCs

> Who asked for AI on hubs and chargers?

USB-C and hdmi cable issues are right up there as causes of frustration for me. But me day the external minute works, next it doesn’t.

Having cables fail in new and unexpected ways with AI sounds amazing.

AI is polarizing.

The rest of the world outside of the US and Europe loves AI. China is embracing it fully.

Why is our Western media making the public hate it so much? It's almost as if it's a top down edict from all the news giants to constantly dump on AI and make it sound like it'll kill you.

If we maintain this view, we're going to get steamrolled. And we'll have deserved it.