2024 is shaping to be a pivotal year in consumer technology, marked by a seismic shift towards GenAI-centered innovations. There will be multiple entirely new product categories apart from a radical transformation of existing ones, like smartphones. All familiar devices are poised to undergo a dramatic evolution, centering around GenAI capabilities, but the excitement could be from entirely new form factors.
A flurry of announcements in this quiet holiday period of 2023 provides us with a window to peer into what is coming. Sam Altman has just enlisted a celebrated Apple product design head to focus on developing a new device based on LLMs (https://engt.co/3NKmbsE). This analyst has long held that chatboxes, as they exist today, are transitional, paving the way for far better interfaces and technological integrations in everything we do.
In robotics, significant strides are being made towards consumer-oriented products over and above some radical announcements from Google a while ago. Tesla's recent unveiling of Optimus 2 demonstrates the fusion of GenAI and robotics, enhancing the learning capabilities of humanoids (https://bit.ly/48d4r1f). This has sparked discussions about the timeline for household robots capable of basic chores. Complementing this, LG has just introduced a smart home AI agent, suggesting new in-home, robot products are likely far sooner than even what the most optimists have believed (https://bit.ly/3vaKt8M).
Major changes are imminent in existing products as well. Apple announced a breakthrough this week by running an LLM on an iPhone, utilizing flash memory for storage (https://bit.ly/3TLG0Uj). Samsung is set to integrate its LLM, Samsung Gauss, across its product range (https://bit.ly/48rg1FU). Additionally, Chinese phone manufacturers have already launched GenAI-enabled phones, to engineer a new replacement cycle (https://bit.ly/3tsRVfc).
2024 is likely to be marked by a wave of GenAI innovations beyond the current chatbot and copilot applications, with a range of new consumer products. These include ambitious projects like the Humane pin (https://hu.ma.ne/) and groundbreaking AI-based interfaces as teased by Rabbit Tech (https://www.rabbit.tech/updates). Not all will succeed, and there is a non-trivial, Blackberry-like-displacement risk for some of today's majors as soon as well. A shift from LLM-focused news to a surge in hardware innovation announcements is likely to occupy us in most of 2024 before innovation waves shift to some other sectors like pharmaceuticals or driverless cars.
