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Carl Pei, co-founder and CEO of There is noneit is thinking about the future beyond the iPhone – and it is a device controlled by AI assistants, without using software.
“When it comes to AI in software, I think people need to understand that software is going to end,” said Pei, whose electronic brand makes it. special calls and additional information. “So, if you’re a startup or an innovator and your program is like where there’s a lot of profit, it’s going to be disrupted whether you want it or not.”
Pei said this at the time of interview at the SXSW conference in Austin on Wednesday.
The founder has talked about the AI-first device before, as this vision helped the company to close i$200 million in Series C funding last year. At the time, Nothing was putting the idea of ​​a new type of smartphone using AI and human technology that is accurate enough so that users don’t feel they have to go behind the AI ​​and review the output.
At SXSW, Pei expanded on his vision for the first AI device and the steps needed to get there.
The first part, which is being tested by some companies today, is an AI part that can give orders on behalf of users, such as booking flights or hotels. Pei, however, dismissed this as “too boring.”
The next step is where things can get interesting, when the AI ​​starts learning the user’s long-term intentions. For example, if you want to be healthy, this device can give you scrolls to help you achieve your goals.
“I think it’s very powerful when it starts to give you ideas; you don’t need to come up with an idea… when the system knows us well, it will come up with things that we don’t know (but) we want,” Pei explained, comparing this idea to something like ChatGPT’s memory.
Explaining his vision for the first AI phone, Pei said it will be a device that can do things for you without needing to be controlled.
“The current way we use phones is very old. It’s before the iPhone… there were Palm Pilots and PDAs before. And if you think about the users, they’re still the same,” Pei said. “You have lock screens, home screens, apps. You look at different apps. Each app is like a full-screen thing. There’s some kind of app store that lets you download a lot of apps. So it hasn’t really changed in 20 years.”
This frustrated him because the technology that consumers are using has changed quite a bit, but what we use has not. Even simple tasks make us skip a few steps, he said.
“It’s very difficult to do things on the phone,” Pei said. Let’s say we want to take over coffee. That’s the goal. But to achieve that goal, we have to go through many different steps and many different programs. Maybe it’s like four apps to get coffee with someone – a messaging app, some kind of map, Uber, a calendar. “
He continued: “I think the future of mobile phones or operating systems should just be: ‘I know you well, and if I know your purpose, I’ll do it for you,’ instead of using all the apps manually.”
“It should only be done through AI,” he said.
This also means that devices can have interfaces that don’t focus on apps that people can navigate through, but instead have interfaces designed for an AI assistant to use.
That doesn’t mean the programs are ending anytime soon, Pei cautioned. There are no operating systems that allow users to write their own small programs today. But in the end, AI will need to use the “app” in a non-confrontational way, without trying to mimic the human touch on smartphones by navigating through menus and clicking options.
“That’s not the future. The future is not an assistant using a human interface. You have to create an interface for the assistant to use. I think that’s the way to show the future,” Pei said.
