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Consumer tech brand Nothing, best known for its transparent phones, says that it is about to release an “AI-first” device.
It will be the latest company to try and harness the excitement about artificial intelligence by building a new device around it. It follows launches and rumours about similar devices coming from everyone from Apple to OpenAI.
But Nothing’s chief executive, Carl Pei, suggested that many of those companies and commentators are confused about how exactly such devices will break into the mainstream, and have their “iPhone moment”. That will not come immediately with a blockbuster device but instead arrive after years of work on more specific devices, he suggested.
AI is “the most important technology of our lifetime, and the whole industry is hunting for its iPhone moment: the pendant, the pin, the glasses, the companion, some magical consumer device that makes AI part of everyone’s life,” Mr Pei wrote in a long post on X. “I admire the boldness, but I read this moment differently.”
He noted that the original iPhone moment only arrived after 30 years of work on mobile devices, which began with “pagers on doctors’ belts and finished with a supercomputer in every pocket”. “It was the payoff for decades of quiet work on tools people used for their jobs,” he wrote.
He suggested that, in a similar way, AI devices will initially arrive with specific productivity uses. It will first come “in the tools people rely on to get real things done, and that’s where the real opportunity is today”, he wrote.
“When the iPhone of AI does arrive in a few years, it will be built on that work,” he wrote. “It might be a form factor nobody has imagined yet, or three of today’s devices collapsing into one.”
The long post appeared to be a shot at some other companies that have tried to pitch their devices as iPhone killers, and a way of running their entire lives. That has already ended in failure for many of the products that have actually launched, such as Humane’s AI Pin, which was heralded as the first post-iPhone device at its launch but led to the collapse of the company who made it last year.
Instead, any AI device that is released soon needs to be focused on its use as a “productivity technology”, and housed in a product made “with the care and pride of a toolmaker” and that earns the trust of its users.
He suggested that Nothing is in a “rare position” to make such a device, because of the fact that it builds its devices from end to end and is already trusted by tens of millions of users. But he cautioned that it would not be the “magical consumer device everyone is searching for”, because that would only come after “years of quiet work”, which the new product is intended to be a part of.
He did not say exactly what form Nothing’s device would take. But it has “no new screen, and it couldn’t have been an app”, and will ship from next month, he said.
