In a few years we will look back at this period in AI with niche hardware startups and companies pouring millions into chatbot UIs and think how early it all was.
The future lives in a thick fog and someone has to venture through. Bless the first to try and find it, but they’re all missing
Looks like handwaving it as the fog of the future will do for now.. I don't see any progress made in this area. It seems like most of the investment is going to the interesting "look what the AI can do" stuff instead of correctness. I'm assuming the interesting stuff is easier to market.
Lots of things are just Android devices. This allows their manufacturers to easily hire people who is comfortable developing on a known platform, and also repurpose very cheap obsolete hardware that couldn't run a modern phone but would still be usable for a stripped down OS that runs only one app. And of course by being hard+soft solutions they can charge a lot more compared to a simple "normal" app.
All good from a business POV, but most of those devices are tight closed with locked bootloaders and other protections against repurposing, which turns them into e-waste once their services are terminated. Pollution issues aside, an old board that runs only Android 4.x is pretty much unusable for everything interesting, while being able to unlock the same board and install Armbian, DietPI or similar OS, turns it into a completely different device.
people have been hard on rabbit r1, but ultimately it is a step toward future I feel. And they bury further down in the article that it requires permissions that the android won't grant.
It's fine to take baby steps, but you can't sell a proof of concept as a real product. People will hate you, and it'll taint their perception of similar products going forward.
That’s just because it needs installed as a system app (read: shipped with the ROM) to access system level permissions. Android will grant them, since it grants them on the Rabbit’s ROM like android would to any system app.
The future lives in a thick fog and someone has to venture through. Bless the first to try and find it, but they’re all missing