It was only a matter of time.
Elon Musk, inveterate inventor and the erstwhile world’s first trillionaire, is reportedly working on a smartphone-like device designed to facilitate communication between humans and AI.
If that last sentence confused you, you’re in good company: Almost nothing is known about the mysterious device, which first surfaced in a report Wednesday afternoon from The Wall Street Journal. According to the paper, the device is being built by Musk’s company SpaceX and “features a sleek design that is slimmer than an iPhone.” It was reportedly first displayed as a prototype to a group of SpaceX investors and other stakeholders before the company’s blockbuster IPO last month.
It will run on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors and technology developed by xAI (which was acquired by SpaceX in February), according to the Journal. Again, it’s too early to say with any certainty what that means, but it hints at some kind of interface for chatting with Grok, the flagship chatbot developed by SpaceX’s AI subsidiary that’s known for its disdain for political correctness and, shall we say, rather lenient approach to safety guardrails.
The vast majority of prototypes never make it to production, and this Starfleet communicator-like device may never see the light of day.
Plenty of people before Musk have tried to build an AI device. Most of those efforts have either led to ignominious failure or faded into obscurity. Whatever the first truly successful AI-centered handheld device does look like, though, there’s good reason to expect it won’t look like your standard old smartphone. Why would people rush to buy a Musk-owned handheld AI communication device when they can already chat with ChatGPT via Voice Mode straight from their phones? Musk himself has previously made the case that the future of human-machine interaction could take place via an implant like Neuralink, obviating the need for handheld devices altogether.
It’s entirely possible that Musk will be the person to finally create the device that succeeds the iPhone as the all-pervasive personal device in the age of AI. Or it could’ve been just a shiny object to woo investors before the SpaceX stocks went up for sale. Or it might not exist at all. Shortly after the Journal’s story was published, Musk posted that the news is “utterly false.”
