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The First AI Gadgets Are a Cautionary Tale

These wearable devices feel new and ambitious — and that’s the problem.

Meta’s less ambitious smart Ray-Bans have been reviewed more positively — they’re subtle, the camera is pretty good, voice commands can produce useful responses, and its image-recognition and translation capabilities are impressive. It appears to be sort of broken, sure, but it also suffers for being an unusually direct encounter with LLM-powered AI, which, despite its fluency in conversation, either has a long way to go or is constitutionally ill suited to some of the tasks at which it seems like it might work. You don’t expect Google Gemini or ChatGPT or your meeting software’s chat assistant to answer a genuinely wide variety of context-dependent questions about the world accurately or with human intuition, in part because that would be unreasonable and unrealistic, but also because it’s not hanging from your shirt, suggesting that it can.

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