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Current AI wearables are criticized for not addressing significant human problems like pain management, mobility assistance, safety, income generation, caregiving support, or chronic disease management. There is a strong need for smart glasses to move beyond simple phone mirroring and offer capabilities that provide substantial solutions to real-world, impactful user challenges.
I don’t normally shame journalists… but I had to check that TechCrunch’s “hottest AI wearable” list wasn’t an old April Fools joke, or satire… none of these are good products. The pattern seems to be: strap an LLM wrapper to the side of your life, call it a wearable, make huge claims, ship it, disappoint customers ….fade away?? Couple of thoughts (and one small rant): 1) The killer feature for these “devices” will end up being iPhone or Android features.. Or at best an app. If your $199 hardware is basically a microphone + API call, you’ve built latency, returns, and e-waste into what could’ve been a settings screen. 2) None of them go after people’s human problems: pain, mobility, safety, income, caregiving, chronic disease, etc. They mostly solve “I wish I didn’t have to tap my phone.” And the solution is instead tapping a weird necklace, clip, or… headsticker? 3) We already watched this movie with Rabbit: huge hype, terrible reviews, fast fade. Yet it still makes the top 5 list?? Is our bar that low? We need to stop celebrating bad ideas just because they have an LLM in the architecture diagram. Instead, let’s celebrate #hardware, #wearables and products that: * Tackle acute, high-stakes problems * Actually need hardware (no agentic agent is going to lift you out of a chair) * Use AI where it creates durable value, not just a launch headline At Skip, we deliberately chose one of the biggest, gnarliest problems out there: helping people move when their own bodies are letting them down. That requires real hardware, new actuation, and our own #AI & deep learning models trained on real-world movement data; not a generic LLM prompt chain. That’s a real data moat, not a Chrome extension. It also means it takes longer. More testing, more engineering, more boring weeks of validation and gait tuning. But the payoff is a product that people actually love: our NPS is 45, not a returns rate that out paces our order rate. Let’s all do better. Build things that matter. Celebrate things that work. Leave a comment with a team or product that is AI-enabled, wearable, more useful than the Rabbit, and I’ll publish an “actually hot” list next week… https://lnkd.in/guq897i8 #BuildThingsThatMatter #UnderpantsGnomeMBA #LLMHype #AIGadgetBubble #NotJustAnLLMWrapper