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Comment on What Sam Altman told OpenAI about the device he's making with Jony Iveparent

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The odds of creating a brand new device that no one has ever heard of that people will carry everywhere with them is basically zero.

If there is enough utility in the device, and the form factor is well done, I think the odds are much higher than zero.

People already have a phone, and aren't going to carry around two tech gadgets. So either this thing does everying a phone can, in which case it's a phone (but it sounds like it doesn't have a screen, so it isn't), or it doesn't, in which case it fails.

I believe it was Kurzweil who had the quip that only novel utility differences drive rapid mass adoption.

The reason mobile devices scaled so rapidly is that calling a specific person (wherever they are) is so much more useful than calling a physical location.

If OpenAI wants to create a successful device, it needs to have that utility delta over an existing smartphone.

(While Google and Apple throw not insignificant resources into competing, with the help of mature mobile ecosystems)

The reason mobile devices scaled so rapidly is that calling a specific person (wherever they are) is so much more useful than calling a physical location.

True, and then the next revolution was smartphones, with the iPhone being the first.

Steve Job's product launch highlighted the huge utility delta, which made all prior "feature phones" obsolete overnight.

"We're introducing THREE new products: a phone, a music player, and an internet communications device" ... which of course was 3-in-1 - the iPhone.

Raising the bar now becomes extremely difficult because the smartphone is a general purpose internet/wifi connected computer, chock full of sensors from cameras to microphone, etc. Now with local AI-acceleration as well.

What can a new device do that a general purpose computer in your pocket cannot?

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