Image credit: Brian Hayter
The Human AI Pin and Rabbit handheld have garnered considerable press interest for their individual approaches to integrating generative AI with hardware. Human, in particular, is pitching its wearables as a look at life beyond the smartphone. This naturally begs the question: What’s wrong with smartphones? While it’s true that the form factor has plateaued, these devices are still in billions of hands around the world.
Earlier this week, I caught up with Jerry Yu during the commotion of Deutsch Telekom’s Mobile World Congress booth. After a product demo and a sit-down conversation, I admit I’m impressed with the vision of the future of smartphones from the founder and CEO of Brain.ai (alternatively known as Brain Technologies). I won’t say I’m completely convinced until I’ve had a chance to spend more time with the product, but it does paint a great picture of exactly how the next generation of devices will look. Creative AI can be basic.
The whole “future” of smartphones might be a bit hyperbolic, but at the very least, I suspect some of the biggest names in the biz are currently studying how first-party generative AI can effectively power a product’s operating system. It forms the backbone of But while phone companies can see the future, the interface can be a blur for consumers. Its implementation turns the current smartphone operating system paradigm on its head, requiring a demo to fully understand how it’s different and why it’s useful. While I admit I wasn’t completely sold by the pitch, seeing it in action brought its usefulness into sharp focus.
The OS isn’t completely disconnected from Google’s open operating system, but only in the sense that it’s built on top of the Android kernel. As we’ve seen with the Trump-era development of Huawei’s HarmonyOS, it’s entirely possible to build something different from Android using it as a base. Here, generative AI is more than just integrated into the system, it underpins the way you interact with the device, how it responds and how it creates interfaces.
The concept of an “AI phone” isn’t exactly new. In fact, that’s a sentence you’re going to hear. much more in the coming years. I guarantee you will be sick of it by December. Elements of AI/ML have been integrated into devices in one form or another over the years. Among other things, the technology is fundamental to computational photography – the processing of data collected by camera sensors that takes place on a chip.
Earlier this month, however, Samsung became one of the first major companies to really dive into the concept of an “AI phone.” Here comes the difference-making AI – the technology behind programs like Google Gemini and ChatGPT. Again, most of the integration is on the imaging side, but it’s starting to filter into other aspects as well.
Image credit: Brian Hayter
Given how heavily Google has invested in Gemini, it stands to reason that this trend will only increase in the coming years. Apple will also enter this category sometime later this year. I wouldn’t rate generative AI on these devices as a complete game changer just yet, but it’s clear that companies that don’t embrace it now will be left behind in the years to come.
Brain.ai’s technology usage is much deeper than other existing implementations. From a hardware perspective, however, it’s a standard smartphone. In fact, the Deutsche Telekom deal that found the U exhibiting in a magenta-filled booth means that the operating system will initially see the light of day via a device called the T-Mobile REVVL here in the States. (referred to as “T phones”. In international markets such as the EU). According to Yue, the exact model, release date and nature of the deal will be revealed “soon”.
However, the truth is that the Brain interface is designed to be hardware-agnostic, adapting to the form factor on which it is being run. That’s not to say that hardware isn’t important, of course. At its heart, the T-Mobile REVVL Plus, for example, is a budget phone, priced around $200. It’s not a flagship by any means, but it gives you decent bang for your buck, including a Snapdragon 625 processor and dual rear cameras at 13- and 15-megapixels, respectively. While 2GB of RAM isn’t much, Yu insists Brain.ai’s operating system can do more with less. Also, again, we don’t know what specific features the device will have at launch.
The interface starts with a static screen. From there, you query things with voice or text prompts. In one example, Yu asked the system to “suggest a gift for my grandmother, who can’t get out of bed.” From there, the brain works by pulling not the answer to the query but an interface specific to it – in this case, the overall e-commerce results. The resulting page is bare-bones from a design perspective – black text on a white background. Alternate sentences with boxes showing the results (in this case, blankets and kindles).
The query is at the top. It is, like most interfaces, interactive. In this case, you can tap to edit the search. Meanwhile, tapping on an image will add it to the shopping cart for the third-party e-commerce site, and you can check out from there. I should note that all of the demo results were pulled directly from Amazon. Yu says the system will pull about 7,000 retail sites at launch, and you can prioritize results by things like retailers and business size (if you want to support small businesses).
Image credit: Brian Hayter
Shopping is the first example Yue shows me, and many of the basic principles apply across the board. There is certainly consistency in design across all features. This is largely due to the fact that the device is virtually devoid of third-party apps. It represents a massive shift from the current smartphone landscape of the past 15-plus years.
“From a privacy and security perspective, we want to give a new level of control that people don’t have right now,” Yu. “The computer understands about you, now it’s aggregated into different apps. These AI models are black boxes – recommendation machines that leverage our attention. We believe in explainable AI. We give you every One step at a time will explain why we’re recommending this. You have more people owning AI, not big tech black boxes.”
Adaptability is another big selling point. The model improves the recommendations and adapts to the user the more queries are run. Of course, third-party app stores were the main reason why the industry was revolutionized. Suddenly you’ve gone from one company creating all of your phone experiences to a system that harnesses the smarts and creativity of countless developers. Brain’s experiment will be a combination of what its 100-person team can produce and what an AI model can dream up. As the model improves, so too will its functionality. Brain.ai is relying on its own model for the core interface, but will pull from third parties like OpenAI and Google when it determines they’re better equipped to answer a specific question.
Image credit: Brian Hayter
There are limits to what can be explored in a demo like this, so, like many other elements, I’ll have to wait until I have a shipping product in my hands to test the experience. Can really guess. I’m particularly interested in how it handles certain applications, such as imaging. It’s worth noting that the REVVL line doesn’t sport great cameras, so unless there’s a major upgrade, this won’t be a device for those who prioritize photos/videos.
The camera will also play an important role in search. An example we discussed is taking a picture of a menu in a foreign country. Not only will it translate (à la Google Lens), it will also offer food recommendations based on your tastes. Yue also briefly demonstrated creating a system image with a simple request that is suitable for our environment: create magenta shoes. It worked so fast, the only real bottleneck was the speed of the convention center connection (ironic, given the settings).
Connectivity is very important here. AI processing is being done off-device. I discussed the possibility of adding some on-device processing, but Yu couldn’t confirm what that might look like at launch. Nor did I find a completely clear answer for the offline experience. I suspect that a large part of the reason there is so much interest in Deutsch Telekom’s product is that it is something that would not have existed in the same way without 5G. It recalls the early days of Mozilla’s ill-fated Firefox OS and Chrome OS, or other examples of a product that loses significant functionality when offline.
Image credit: Brian Hayter
Yue founded Brain in 2015, and was its sole employee until being hired as CTO the following year (Yue is the sole founder). Born in China, he first became involved with technology through his love of robotics and participation in the RoboCup robotic soccer tournament. At the age of 18, he founded Friendok, a Chinese social app. Two years later, he co-founded Benlai.com, now one of the largest food delivery apps in the country. Yue has since returned to the Bay Area to run Brain.ai full time. To date, the company has raised $80 million.
After nearly a decade, the brain interface is almost ready to launch — and it arrives just in time. The zeitgeist is heavily focused on the way AI powers the experience, from standalone devices like the Rabbit and Humane Ai Pin to tech giants like Samsung creating their own “AI phones.”