Nothing on the next phone will be based solely on artificial intelligence

Nothing but CEO Carl Pei posted a video in which he makes two gigantic claims: that smartphones are actually the AI ​​gadget of the future, and that AI has the potential to change the way we exploit these phones. “People love their phones!” Pei says in the video. But “the user experience hasn’t really changed in a really long time.” Everything is faster, prettier and easier, he says, “but the basic experience hasn’t changed.” Pei now believes that will change soon.

I should note that Pei mentions in passing the existence of the Phone 3, which was been rumored for some time and if Nothing sticks to its typical July release schedule, it could hit shelves soon. According to Pei, the Phone 3 will also be the company’s first phone with true artificial intelligence.

In the video, Nothing shows off several demos. One looks like a straight copy of OpenAI’s GPT-4o demo: a personalized voice assistant built into the operating system. That’s it all believes this is the future of smartphones. The second demo shows off a personalized, energetic home screen that looks like a combination of an app launcher and a news feed. It automatically retrieves and displays the QR code of the ticket you’ll need soon, pulls content from the Internet, and displays relevant reminders and weather. The idea, Pei says, is to think about how artificial intelligence can move smartphones from an app-centric model to a system that always knows what you need and where it is.

Pei is careful to say that these are brand up-to-date prototypes and even fiddling with the home screen will take some time. “You can’t just send out a new product and say, ‘There are no apps left, are you going to buy it?’” he says in the video. “Of course they won’t buy it.” (I can’t prove this is an attack on Humane or Rabbit, but… it definitely is.) Pei says Nothing’s job is to build a bridge between today’s systems and the next. He also compares Nothing to Nintendo in the sense that its mission is not to compete with technology, but to simply do fun and good things.

There’s been nothing explicit about AI for some time: it integrated ChatGPT into the latest Ear headphones and last year VergecastPei told me he’s already thinking about a world beyond apps. “We believe that apps have become too powerful,” he then said, “and with Phone 2, we’re trying to at least give users the option to take back some of that power.” Last year, this largely meant changing the look of the interface and giving users more control over notifications, but now it seems to mean artificial intelligence. “Maybe we can just tell the phone what to do,” he continued, “and it will use these apps for us, and the apps won’t even be in the foreground.”

As for smartphones: Pei has always said that the reason Nothing started building headphones and smartphones was because these are the gadgets that everyone uses these days. “I think a computing device consisting of a large screen with some camera capabilities will be the dominant solution for a long time,” he said last year. He believed that building phones was a safer, if more competitive, business, and Humane and Rabbit’s experience seems to prove him right. But he hinted that the next gigantic thing might be coming soon – and now it looks like it might be the most significant thing you already have. Just a little different.