Nothing CEO Carl Pei says he wants to do for smartphones and AI gadgets what Nintendo did for consoles.
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Nothing CEO Carl Pei just released a video in which he makes two big statements: that smartphones are actually the AI gadgets of the future, and that AI can change the way we use these phones. “People love their phones!” Pei says in the video. But “the user experience hasn’t really changed in a long time.” Everything is faster, prettier, and easier, he says, “but the fundamental experience hasn’t changed.” Pei now believes that’s about to change.
I should note that Pei casually mentions the existence of a new Nothing Phone, which has been rumored for some time and, if Nothing sticks to its typical July release schedule, could be on shelves soon. According to Pei, the Nothing Phone 3 will also be the company's first true AI phone.
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In the video, the Nothing team shows off a couple of demos. One looks like a direct copy of OpenAI’s GPT-4 demo: a personalized voice assistant built into the operating system. This is what everyone thinks the future of smartphones will look like. The other demo shows a personalized, dynamic home screen that looks like a combination of an app launcher and a news feed. It automatically grabs and displays a QR code for a ticket you’ll need soon, pulls in content from the web, and shows relevant reminders and the weather. The idea, Pei says, is to think about how AI can move smartphones from an app model to a system that simply knows what you need and where you are at all times.
Pei is careful to say that these are brand new prototypes, and that even changing your home screen will take time to happen. “You can’t just release a new product and say, ‘Here, there’s no more apps, are you going to buy it?’ Of course they won’t.” (I can’t prove that this is an indirect jab at Humane or Rabbit, but… it definitely is.) Pei says that Nothing’s job is to build a bridge from current systems to the next ones. He also compares Nothing to Nintendo, in the sense that the job isn’t to compete on technology but to just make fun and good things.
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Nothing has clearly been thinking about AI for a while now: it integrated ChatGPT into its recent Nothing Ear , and last year on The Vergecast, Pei told me that it’s already thinking about a world beyond apps. “We feel like apps have gotten too much power,” he said at the time, “and with Phone 2, we’re at least trying to give users options to take back some of that power.” Last year, that mostly meant changing the UI and giving users more notification controls, but now that seems to mean AI. “Maybe we can just tell the phone what to do,” he continued, “and it would use those apps for us without the apps being visible in the foreground.”
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As for smartphones: Pei has always said that the reason Nothing started out making headphones and smartphones is because those are the gadgets that everyone is really using right now. “A computing device consisting of a big screen with some camera capability, I think, is going to be the dominant form factor for a long time,” he said last year. He believed that making phones was a safer, if more competitive, business, and the experience of Humane and Rabbit seems to bear him out. He hinted, though, that the next big thing might be coming soon — now it looks like it might be the big thing you already have. Just a little different.
Source: theverge
