This week at MWC, the company showed off a device that gives failing smartphones a bright future.
A lot of news outlets are interested in the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit handheld for the different ways they use creative AI with hardware. Humane’s gear is especially meant to show what life is like after the smartphone. Of course, that makes you wonder: What exactly is wrong with the smartphone? Form factors have stopped changing, but these phones are still in billions of people’s hands.
In the middle of the noise at Deutsch Telekom’s Mobile World Congress booth earlier this week, I met with Jerry Yue. I have to say that the founder and CEO of Brain.ai (also called Brain Technologies) has a great vision for the future of smartphones. I was impressed by both the product demo and the talk we had. For now, I won’t say I’m completely sold until I’ve had more time with the product, but it does paint a very interesting picture of how generative AI could be the basis for the next generation of products.
It’s possible that the whole “future of smartphones” thing is exaggerated, but I think some of the biggest names in the business are at least looking into how first-party creative AI can be used as the core of a product’s operating system. But while phone companies may be able to see the future, customers may find it harder to use. The implementation is very different from how smartphone operating systems work now, and you need to see a demo to fully understand how it works and why it’s important. I’ll admit that the pitch didn’t fully convince me, but seeing it in action makes it clear how useful it is.
Although the OS isn’t completely separate from Google’s open OS, it is. The OS is built on top of the Android base. It’s possible to make something different from Android using it as a base, as we saw with Huawei’s HarmonyOS development during the Trump administration. It’s not just built into this system; generative AI is what makes the way you connect with the device, how it responds, and the interface it builds possible.
The thought of a “AI phone” isn’t completely new. You’ll hear this phrase a lot in the years to come. By December, I’m sure you’ll be sick of it. AI and machine learning have been used in some way in devices for a few years now. Computing photography, which is the processing of data from the camera sensor that happens on the chip, is built on this technology, among other things.
This month, though, Samsung was one of the first big companies to really get behind the idea of a “AI phone.” This is different because creative AI has arrived. This is the technology that makes programs like Google Gemini and ChatGPT possible. In this case, too, most of the merging takes place in imaging, but it’s starting to show up in other areas as well.
Google has put a lot of money into Gemini, so this trend will likely only get stronger over the next few years. At some point later this year, Apple will also join the group. I wouldn’t say that generative AI has completely changed the game on these devices yet, but it’s clear that companies that don’t adopt it now will be left behind in the years to come.
Brain.ai uses the technology in a way that goes much further than other companies do right now. But in terms of tech, it’s just a normal smartphone. As a matter of fact, the Deutsch Telecom deal that put Yue in the magenta booth means that the operating system will first be used on the T-Mobile REVVL device in the US (called the “T Phone” in other countries like the EU). “Soon,” Yue says, the exact model, release date, and character of the deal will be made public.
But the truth is that the Brain interface is made to work with any hardware by adjusting to the size and shape of the device it’s on. But that doesn’t mean hardware isn’t important. When you get right down to it, the T-Mobile REVVL Plus, which costs about $200, is a cheap phone. It’s not a flagship phone by any means, but it’s a good deal for the money, with a Snapdragon 625 chip and two 13- and 15-megapixel cameras on the back. Yue says that the Brain.ai’s operating system can do more with less RAM, even though 2GB isn’t a lot. Also, once more, we don’t know what exact specs the device will have when it comes out.
The experience starts with a screen that doesn’t change. After that, you can ask questions with a voice or text cue. Yue asks the system to “suggest a gift for my grandmother who can’t get out of bed” in one case. Brain then starts to pull up, not the answer to the question, but an interface that is just for it. In this case, it’s a list of all the e-commerce results. The page that comes up is very simple to look at—it just has black letters on a white background. Boxes that show findings (in this case, blankets and Kindles) move between sentences.
The question is at the top. A lot of the system, including this, can be used to do things. You can tap in to change the search in this case. When you tap on an image, it will be added to a buying cart on a third-party e-commerce site. From there, you can check out. It is important to remember that all of the results shown in the demo came straight from Amazon. Yue says the system will bring in about 7,000 shopping sites when it first starts up. You can sort the results by retailer or business size, if you’d rather help smaller companies.
The first thing Yue shows me is shopping, but many of the basic ideas are the same everywhere. Certainly, the style is the same across all features. Part of the reason for this is that the device doesn’t have any third-party apps. This is a huge change from how smartphones have been used for the past 15 years or so.
“From a privacy and safety point of view, we want to give people more power than they have now,” Yue said. “The computer knows a lot about you, and it’s now put together in different apps.” As far as we can tell, these AI models are just black boxes that use our attention to make suggestions. We believe in AI that can be explained. We are going to tell you every step of the way why we are suggesting something. That is, more people own the AI instead of big tech boxes.
Another great thing is that it is adaptable. The more queries and changes are made to the model, the better the suggestions and the more it fits the person. Of course, third parties were the main reason why app shops changed the business world. All of a sudden, your phone’s experiences aren’t made by just one company, but by a system that uses the smarts and creativity of many creators. Brain’s experience will be a mix of what its 100-person team can make and what the AI model can come up with. The model’s usefulness will get better as it gets better. While Brain.ai’s own model is used for the main interface, it will also use models from OpenAI and Google when it thinks they can better answer a certain question.
Unfortunately, a test like this can only show you so much. Like many other things, I need to wait until I get a shipping product in my hands to really judge the experience. I’m especially interested in how it works with images and other programs. The REVVL line doesn’t have great cameras, so unless there’s a big update, this won’t be the best device for people who care a lot about photos and movies.
The camera will also be very useful for the search. Taking a picture of a menu in a different country is one situation we talked about. It will not only translate (like Google Lens), but it will also suggest foods for you based on what you like. Yue also quickly showed how the system could make pictures by asking it to make magenta sneakers, which fit with the setting. It went very fast; the only thing that slowed it down was the slow connection speeds at the convention center, which is funny given the settings.
Connectivity is very important here. The AI work is being done somewhere else. I talked to Yue about the possibility of putting some processing on the device, but he couldn’t say for sure what it would look like at launch. I also didn’t get a clear answer about the offline experience. A big reason why Deutsch Telekom might be interested in the product is probably that it wouldn’t be possible without 5G. It makes me think of Mozilla’s failed Firefox OS and the early days of Chrome OS, as well as many other products that lose important features when they’re not connected to the internet.
Yue started Brain in 2015 and was the only employee until the next year, when he hired a CTO. Yue is still the only founder. He first became interested in technology because he loved robotics and played in the RoboCup robotic soccer event. He started the Chinese social app Friendoc when he was 18. After two years, he helped start Benlai.com, which is now one of the biggest food service apps in the country. Yue moved back to the Bay Area and now runs Brain.ai full-time. The business has raised $80 million so far.
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It’s been almost ten years, but the Brain interface is almost ready to go live, and it’s coming at just the right time. People are very interested in the type of generative AI that drives the experience, from devices like Rabbit and the Humane Ai Pin that work on their own to tech giants like Samsung that are selling their own “AI phones.”
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