AI: Product or function?

The latest question is whether AI is a product or a feature, because we’ve seen it as a standalone product. For example, we have the Humane AI Pin in 2024, which is a piece of hardware specifically designed to interact with AI. We have the Rabbit r1, a device that promises to materialize the assistant you carry around with you. Now, these two devices don’t perform very well and they don’t work as well but what if they do well? Assuming they work really well, there’s no problem. So, we can think of AI as a product and we can even think about things like going to ChatGPT and using AI there and that’s AI as a product.
But now, just a few months later, we just came out of Apple’s WWDC and Google I/O and the two approaches are very different. Look what happened to Apple. They worked like a machine gradually adding these AI features to many of their operating systems. For example, Now in any application with writing capabilities there are new language model-driven writing tools that pop up to help you summarize or proofread or change your writing style and tone and there’s also a new Siri that’s driven by these language models that can better conduct conversations and understand context and use semantic indexing to parse information about various documents and content on the device to enhance it Siri’s understanding. You can even generate images directly on the device as a feature. You can generate emojis. The list could go on, but the point is, this is obviously a very different way for consumers to think about AI, it’s just a feature in the device you use built into the device you use.
I know the analogy may not be perfect. I think probably the biggest problem is that when they put these features together, like Slack, Spaces created by Twitter, etc., when they built these features, they didn’t put Clubhouse into these big sites. They actually just took the idea of Clubhouse, which is an audio event that happens in real time, and incorporated it into their own app, so Clubhouse was eliminated.