- Ring just launched AI Pilot
- That should not be read as long-term support for the term ‘artificial Intelligence’, though
- Company CEO Jamie Siminoff insisted it was not tying “to make any statements”
In its struggle to deliver an effective home-surveillance drone to consumers, Ring struggled with how to balance local intelligence with consistent flying skills. Turned out that the answer was in the cloud, or more specifically, cloud AI.
But in the time it took for Ring to solve that riddle, and launch both the Ring Drone Cam and its AI Pilot, no less a figure than the President of the United States President decided to rename ‘artificial intelligence’ to ‘super intelligence’.
It’s been almost two months since Donald Trump stood before the United Nations and announced that the US Government would be renaming AI to SI because, “It sounds much better, and it’s much more accurate…. there’s nothing artificial about it.”
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Forget that huge swaths of the tech industry have already hung their company names and branding around ‘AI’ (you may have heard of a small company called OpenAI, or maybe Apple‘s Siri AI); Trump sought to make the change official.
What’s more remarkable, though, is that tech giants like Google‘s Sundar Pichai, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Nvidia‘s now-beleaguered CEO Jensen Huang fell into line.
Over at Ring’s parent company, Amazon, though, the picture is less clear.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said he agrees with Trump, telling Fox News last month, “I do like SI because artificial is not a very flattering thing.”
Meanwhile, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy conducted a recent earnings call in which he used “AI” over and over again.
Getting tech execs to choose, though, isn’t easy.
During the Ring Drone Cam launch event, I asked Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff about the use of ‘AI’ in AI Pilot. Would the company be changing the name?
Siminoff smiled like he’d been expecting the question, and replied, “I mean, there’s different names for it. Certainly we’re not trying to make any statements by how we’re using that.”
But in a nod to how quickly the landscape can change under your feet, Siminoff added, “But the AI Pilot was named earlier.” So, there are currently no plans to change it, but also no indication that Ring won’t, someday, have an ‘SI Pilot’ guiding the Ring Drone Cam through your home.
I pressed, and asked if we were safe to keep calling it ‘artificial Intelligence.’ Simioff would only reiterate, “I think people are using different names for it, and so we’re gonna — uh, but right now it is the AI Pilot”
Super unclear
Siminoff’s response is not surprising. After all, the tech industry seems somewhat split on whether to follow Trump’s Executive order, which demands that all government agencies “use ‘Super Intelligence’ and ‘SI’ in place of ‘Artificial Intelligence’ and ‘AI’ in official correspondence, public communications, websites, reports, policy documents, and other non-statutory documents within the executive branch.”
But, outside the halls of the White House, there’s little agreement on whether the world should be switching from AI to SI.
As Siminoff points out, “The AI Pilot was named earlier.” There was no way for Ring to know that Trump would attempt to rename an entire tech sector while it was trying to figure out how to make a drone light and efficient enough to navigate and surveil your home.
Who knows? The next version of AI Pilot may very well be SI Pilot. On the other hand, it took years for Ring to get this right. By the time the next Ring Drone Cam arrives, Trump will likely be out of office, and we may be done talking about AI vs. SI.
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lance.ulanoff@futurenet.com (Lance Ulanoff)
