What is the Best Interface for AI to Truly Transform Your Life?

Walmart and its offspring Sam's Club have decided to hop onto the AI bandwagon. The idea is simple: make you part with your cash in less time, because as the old saying goes, time is money. Walmart has teamed up with Microsoft's Azure OpenAI Service – arguably the best choice for enterprise AI – to jazz up the digital shopping escapade. Imagine this: a generative AI-powered search function embedded in websites and apps, which acts like your personal shopping assistant. It dives into your shopping history and creates ultra-personalized shopping lists and suggestions, tailored just for you.

Meanwhile, Sam’s Club is developing an AI checkout system. It is a system that peers into your shopping cart with computer vision, making sure every item is accounted for without the need for a human to play peek-a-boo at the exit. This is a sidekick to their existing Scan & Go system, where customers use smartphones as personal cash registers, bypassing the traditional checkout lines.

On the broader AI front, OpenAI is aiming to save you even more time. They're launching a veritable Swiss Army Knife in the AI world, the OpenAI GPT store. It promises to assist you in everything from coding to writing to playing detective in your data searches. Meanwhile, Humane AI is introducing their own contender, the Pin – a device that wants to be your AI-infused personal secretary, embedded seamlessly into your daily life.

Ultimately, the buzz surrounding generative AI springs from its prowess in outperforming humans in speed and efficiency across a myriad of tasks, thus conserving our time and money. This leads to the billion-dollar question: what would be the ideal interface for generative AI to profoundly enhance our lives, specifically in boosting our efficiency? Is the answer a traditional PC, an innovative new gadget, or the smartphone that's already in our hands?

The Three Core Pillars that Define the Ultimate AI Interface

In our quest to uncover the supreme interface for AI – one that promises to save you both time and money – we embark on a journey through three fundamental principles. These are the pillars upon which our quest rests:

1. Optimal Information Delivery:?We seek interfaces that provide the most comprehensive, relevant, and high-quality information.
2. Speed and Efficiency:?We seek the fastest channel for information.
3. Accessibility:?We require the information interface to be accessible anytime, anywhere.

In this context, 'information' isn't just data; it's the lifeblood of your daily routine – the whats, whens, wheres, and hows.

Optimizing for these three principles, we consider the three main types of interfaces: computers, smartphones, and potential novel devices like the Pin by Humane AI.

Computers:?These score high on delivering information and doing it at breakneck speeds (provided you're within Wi-Fi's embrace). But, let's face it, even laptops are not exactly pocket-friendly.

The Pin (and other upcoming novel devices):?Representing the avant-garde, the Pin replaces screens with a laser projector that turns your hand into a temporary tablet. It's voice-activated, but its prowess in delivering information swiftly and accurately remains a mystery, shrouded in the mists of 'yet-to-be-released'.

And then, there's the smartphone?– the reigning champion, the undisputed heavyweight of interfaces. Smartphones have morphed into technological Swiss Army knives – sporting large displays, high-performance processors, and an assortment of connectivity. All this, and they still snuggle comfortably in your pocket.

For those envisioning a future where AI-enabled devices like the Pin dethrone the smartphone in 2024, brace yourselves for a jolt of reality. The smartphone isn't ready to relinquish its crown just yet.

Smartphones Will Eventually Become the Go-to Interface for AI

Today, many of us predominantly use our computers to engage with generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Stability AI, Runway, and several others, particularly for tasks involving image or video generation that leverage the local resources of our computers. Despite smartphones being the ideal interface, it has not garnered the hype it should have.?The reason? Generative AI, in its current state, hasn't yet shown us its full potential to enrich our daily lives beyond just work efficiency and workload reduction. Let’s be honest no one uses generative AI for the sake of using generative AI.

Take, for example, asking ChatGPT to plan a holiday itinerary. More often than not, it'll hurl at you a list of tourist hotspots without a whiff of personalization. It doesn't know your likes, dislikes, or that quirky habit of yours of collecting fridge magnets from every city you visit. A big chunk of this personal context could, by the way, be gleaned from your smartphone.

But remember, our primary aim with generative AI is to save time through efficiency and effectiveness. Thus, the future's ultimate AI would be less like a tool and more like a personal secretary. Imagine an AI that doesn't just help with work but orchestrates every facet of your life – automating responses, managing shopping lists, planning vacations – you name it.

For such an AI to be truly transformative, it needs to be by your side, learning and adapting to your habits, behaviors, and quirks. Until Elon Musk's Neuralink becomes a practical reality, the smartphone remains the most ubiquitous and personal interface we have, tagging along in our pockets and handbags, witnessing our lives in all their glory and chaos.