Should It Just Be An App? | AI Inside podcast

Jason Howell and Jeff Jarvis delve into the ongoing debate around AI hardware devices like the Rabbit R1, licensing deals for AI training data, and a child learning study that challenges assumptions about machine intelligence.

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This is AI Inside Episode 15, recorded Wednesday, May 1st, 2024. Should it just be an app? This episode of AI Inside is made possible by our wonderful patrons at patreon.com/AIInsideShow. If you like what you hear, head on over and support us directly. Well, what's going on, everybody? Welcome to another episode of AI Inside, the show where we take a look at the AI that's inside everything. Sometimes I want to say the AI that's hiding inside everything, but that sounds kind of mischievous, and I don't know if it's necessarily always a matter of mischief, but I'm sure sometimes it is. Anyways, I am here joined as always by my co-host, Jeff Jarvis. How are you doing, Jeff?

Hey there, the secret AI, the AI you don't know about, which is actually true when I think about a lot of cases. It's in a lot of things you don't know about. Well, yeah, that's exactly it. More and more, yeah, increasingly with every month in the year 2024, it seems to be everywhere, that's for sure. Mail, translation, maps, search, advertising, tons of it, yep. It's everywhere. Yep, it's in your smartphones, it's embedded in your smartphones. And we're going to talk about how these AI devices are being embedded by Android, actually, which actually isn't a huge surprise.

I'm super curious to hear your take on this, because people are freaking out about this, and we'll get to it in a second, about the Rabbit R1 and the Android roots of it. Before we do, I do just want to say that AI Inside, it's an independent podcast. We rely on the support of our amazing fans and followers to keep the show running. So you can do that. If you want to help us with this show and support the future of AI Inside, go to patreon.com/AIInsideShow. You get lots of cool things, ad-free episodes, of course, early access to select AI-related bonus content, AI Inside merchandise, which we just added to the Patreon. I don't even have that yet. Jeff doesn't have that yet. Oh, no, I didn't. Oh, I can't wait.

The cool thing about the merchandise is the shirt says AI Inside. And so my thought is when you're walking around town, everybody wonders, do you have AI Inside of you? So that's the cool run-on effect of that. You start moving like a robot. Yeah, right, exactly. So patreon.com/AIInsideShow. And we also do a shoutout to our community of supporters each and every week, like Jon Baglivo. Jon, thank you so much for your support. We really do appreciate you.

Recent Event

So yesterday, finally, with Common Crawl Foundation, we held the event in New York called AI and the Right to Learn and the Open Internet. About 120 people came, amazing group of people, AI people, researchers, publishers, journalists, policy folks. Mike Masnick gave a phenomenal presentation about the risk to the open internet. 150 slides in five minutes, talking about as fast as I do. Gard Steiro, the editor of VG, the Schibsted chain, came to talk about what they're doing. We had an episode two of this very podcast we had on Schibsted's CTO and talked about the different attitude there. And it really was a great presentation of how the Norwegians are doing things right and we're screwing up. And so there was no effort to form an organization or no agenda. The idea was to get together and talk through these issues about how there's dangers to free expression and fair use being presented by this fight over AI. There's issues on both sides. We wanted to hear both sides and talk that through. But it was a great event and I was really delighted to be there. So I moderated the whole day. That's why my voice is a bit bass today. A little crackly, a little lower than normal. It's good for podcasts, character. But what I want to thank, it was held at Civic Hall in New York, which is a new place that Craig Newmark helped fund. And he gave a welcome to everybody. So it was a great event and I'm grateful. And today I gave a keynote fireside chat at Bühler Tech's ad tech conference. So it was quite a bit of a difference. But that was fascinating too, Jason, because especially the conversation after mine, talking with the people, the impact of AI and advertising, what's happening with advertising and programmatic, which is all AI folks, how you get your ads in the instant that you open your browser and what's that's causing in terms of the quality of advertising, the quality of content. There's a lot of fascinating stuff going on around all of us. So that's been a busy two days. Man, no kidding. Well, I have no counter as far as how busy I've been. I mean, I've been busy, but I haven't been doing events, man. You make me look bad. I love how active you are.

That's the next revenue stream for you is conventions, I think. There we go. AI Inside, the show. AI is inside everything in this hall. Pay $2,000 to get a ticket and you get a free t-shirt included. An AI Inside t-shirt, which you can now find. Sorry. Yeah, totally worth it. Totally worth it, right? Cool stuff. Thank you for recounting that. And it's cool to kind of see the closure because I know you were just kind of entertaining the idea in episode one and here we are. And it was a full day event and it went fantastic. It was great. Yeah, good stuff.

The Debate Around AI Hardware Devices

Well, we've got some really interesting things to talk about. And I wasn't certain that we were going to talk about the Rabbit R1 two days, two episodes in a row, but this is just kind of the way things work. And there is some really current news about the Rabbit R1 right now that I'm curious to get your take because you also, for those who don't know, I think a lot of people who listen to the show know this already, but for those who might not know, Jeff Jarvis also does another show called This Week in Google for the Twit.TV network and talks a lot about Google and Android and everything Googly as well as many other things. But this story really crosses both paths because we've got the Rabbit R1 that we talked about last week.

It's the hardware device, AI companions, little orange thing with a scroll wheel and a screen. I think the reviews embargo lifted this week, so we saw a bunch of reviews. Not good. I mean, marginally better than the humane AI pin reaction. Only marginally, really? Wow. I mean, the AI pin really had a lot of negativity around the fact that it was so dang expensive and it required a monthly fee on top of all the other hardware issues that it had and software and the delays and lag and all that kind of stuff. This thing's a lot less expensive, right? It's $200. You don't have a monthly fee tied in with this, but I think a lot of the reviews really reached a similar conclusion, half-baked, bad battery. And the question that seems to keep coming up around this stuff, and my hunch is that we're going to be here for a while before we move on from this question with devices like this, is does this need to be a hardware device? Could it actually be an app instead?

Why would I want to carry around or wear or whatever this thing to do this AI interaction when we're already so used to carrying around a smartphone to do a lot of these things? So that's the first question. Before I kind of get into some of the late-breaking news, how do you feel about that thought right there? Are they proving themselves to you as far as realizing that it's an early stage right now? These things don't go from zero to 60. We got to start somewhere, but what are your thoughts?

Well, it was so great last week to have somebody who'd had a hands-on, and that's the question we focused on, was does this need to be a device? Which is, I think, a legitimate question. However, I think we also said last week we'd like to see some experimentation with these things. And Apple and Google are going to be afraid of releasing something that's too rough. And so I think it's worth playing with. So at the event this week, I ended up at dinner sitting next to Parag Agrawal, formerly CEO of Twitter. And I look at him, and I see RayBan on the side of these glasses that are pretty thick. And I said, oh, are those the MetaGlasses? And so we talked about that. Did you get to try them on? No, I didn't. I thought that'd be cheeky, because it says glasses with his prescription and everything. I was tempted to ask. I didn't. I did ask whether he talks to it, and he said, no, no, no, I don't talk to it. It's mainly for pictures of his kids. And audio. Those are the two things. He likes them for that. So there it is. There's one device that has a satisfied customer. It's not doing basically any AI. Well, it is now. They've got multimodal. Well, he's not. But he's not. It is. Yes, it is. That's right. So it'll be interesting to see other devices come down the pike. Rabbit talked about a wearable, a watch. I always forget the name of the damn pen. Humane AI Pin. Humane. It's a dumb name. Okay, anyway. It's a machine. It's not humane. It's anyway. And the rabbit is cute. And the physical UI is fun. People like it. I mean, it's got teenage engineering, which has a lot of cachet in the technology design now. So on that first point, there was a long-winded answer to a simple question. I think it's worthwhile to see experiments. I wouldn't want to spend $1,000 for one, as I did with Google Glass. $1,500, damn dollars. You learned your lesson. I'm still bitter. I'm still bitter. But I'm all for companies trying stuff. Having said that, now the issue is?

Well, so the question that I mentioned just a few minutes ago, this does it need to be its own hardware? Can't it just be an app? And really, at the end of the day, I think in this early stage, that's exactly what it is. Mishaal Rahman, who's my co-host on Android Faithful, was sent the R1 Launcher APK, which is like the install, the app install file for Android. He got it from a source, got it running on a Pixel 6, which seemed right on its face to prove that, okay, well, this device that really hinges on the power of AI, it really is an app. If people are asking this question, at the end of the day, that's exactly what this is. It's an app running on a bespoke piece of hardware doing exactly that. And so, okay, so then do I need this versus just having this app, let's say, on a phone? And actually, while we were doing the show yesterday, it was really interesting because we were talking about the story. And in real time, the Rabbit CEO or Rabbit CEO, Jesse Lyu, responded to Mishaal during the show on X, saying in the response, it's weird because he says it's not an Android app. But yet, he goes on later to say Rabbit OS and the large action model run on the cloud with very bespoke AOSP, which is like the unbranded kind of foundation of Android, and lower level firmware modifications. So really, at the end of the day, this is an Android device, and that's ho

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