Tesla and xAI founder Elon Musk says the smartphone era is nearing an end, predicting that artificial intelligence will fundamentally replace the device in the coming years.
In a new episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Musk says that in the future, phones will be replaced with a device with a screen and audio capabilities.
Musk notes that the device will act only as a portal to AI systems that generate content, anticipate user needs and run without operating systems or apps.
“I can tell you where I think things are going to go, which is that we’re not going to have a phone in the traditional sense. What we call a phone will really be an edge node for AI inference, for AI video inference, with some radios to obviously connect. But essentially, you’ll have AI on the server side communicating to an AI on your device, formerly known as a phone, and generating real-time video of anything that you could possibly want.
And I think that there won’t be operating systems, there won’t be apps in the future, there won’t be operating systems or apps. It’ll just be, you’ve got a device that is there for the screen and audio and to put as much AI on the device as possible so as to minimize the amount of bandwidth that’s needed between your edge node device only known as a phone, and the servers.”
Musk also predicts that apps like X and functionalities like email will go away.
“You’ll get everything through AI… Whatever you can think of, or really whatever the AI can anticipate you might want, it’ll show you.”
When asked for the potential timeline of a smartphone-free future, Musk gives a near-term estimate, rather than a far-off prediction.
“It’s probably five or six years, something like that.”
Earlier this week, Nvidia unveiled a $1 billion investment in Nokia and launched a new telecom compute platform as part of a partnership to accelerate AI-driven mobile networks. The partnership aims to build commercial-grade AI-native radio access networks (AI-RAN).
AI-RAN leverages artificial intelligence to enhance the performance of mobile networks and create new AI-driven services.
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