Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

Every company building your AI assistant is now an ad company

On January 16, OpenAI quietly announced that ChatGPT would begin showing advertisements. By February 9th, ads were live. Eight months earlier, OpenAI spent $6.5 billion to acquire Jony Ive's hardware startup io. They're building a pocket-sized, screenless device with built-in cameras and microphones -- "contextually aware," designed to replace your phone.

But this isn't a post about OpenAI. They're just the latest. The problem is structural.

Every single company We can quibble about Apple. building AI assistants is now funded by advertising. And every one of them is building hardware designed to see and hear everything around you, all day, every day. These two facts are on a collision course, and local on-device inference is the only way off the track.

The always-on future is inevitable

Before we talk about who's building it, let's be clear about what's being built.

Every mainstream voice assistant today works behind a gate. You say a magic word -- "Hey Siri," "OK Google," "Alexa" -- and only then does the system listen. Everything before the wake word is theoretically discarded.

This was a reasonable design in 2014. It is a dead end for where AI assistance needs to go.

Here's what happens in a real kitchen at 6:30am: Anonymized from one of our test homes. The real version was messier and included a toddler screaming about Cheerios.

"Are we out of eggs again? I'm thinking frittata tonight but we also need to -- oh wait, did the school email about Thursday? I think there's a early release. Anyway, if we don't have eggs, I'll get them from Target and also that dish soap, the blue one."

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