Every AI assistant company is now an ad company, and they're building always-on surveillance hardware

A blog post argues that every major company building AI assistants (OpenAI, Google, Amazon, Meta) is now funded by advertising while simultaneously building hardware designed to see and hear everything around users all day. OpenAI began showing ChatGPT ads in February after acquiring Jony Ive's hardware startup for $6.5B. The author argues that local on-device inference is the only way to break the collision course between always-on AI assistants and advertising business models that monetize user data. Current wake-word designs are "a dead end" for where AI assistance needs to go.

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