AI

Pebble Was More Than a Smartwatch Pioneer – Exploring Core, the Original AI Gadget

With Pebble returning to the smartwatch fray, I thought it would be fun to revisit their only non-watch product: Pebble Core. While Core never ended up shipping, looking back it gave us a glimpse of something that’s been happening over the past year or two. AI-centric gadgets like the Humane AI Pin, Rabbit R1, Limitless Pendant, and others have become a major topic of conversation amongst the tech crowd. So has, their usefulness but that’s a separate debate.

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AI Searches Just Got Way Faster

If you’ve been using Perplexity or any other AI-based search engine, you know that it takes a few seconds to get the answer to your questions typically. That’s why I was so psyched about Perplexity’s announcement today that they had shipped an updated version of their in-house Sonar model built on Llama and powered by new Cerebras infrastructure. One of the reasons that Perplexity is so great is that they use specialized AI models tuned specifically for search.

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Operator May be The Future, But it’s Still Too Early

A little over a week ago I reluctantly paid $200 last week to try out OpenAI’s new Operator web app designed to allow you to automate complex tasks. The tool, a new website included in the ChatGPT Pro subscription offering, lets you command a virtual machine to go out and complete requests via a browser. It’s similar to what Rabbit created for their LAM feature for the R1 gadget, if you’re familiar with that.

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Perplexity Pro Now Has R1, o3-mini, and Just About Everything Else

I’ve used nearly all of the premium AI subscription services, but none of them come close to offering the value that Perplexity Pro does. Despite the company’s contentious relationship with publishers, I’ve continued to believe it is one of the best-positioned startups in the space. After the emergence of DeepSeek, my lack of usage of Sora or Operator, and realizing my primary use case is almost always search, I moved on from services offered directly by the LLM providers.

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Perplexity Assistant is the Best Example of Apple Needing to Expand Extensibility on iOS

Last week Perplexity launched their latest product: Perplexity Assistant for Android. I’ve been a big fan of Perplexity for a long time. Despite its often contentious relationship with publishers, they make a spectacularly good tool. I love them, if only for the fact that they’re the first search engine to give Google a run for its money in years. But this isn’t about the search engine game or the AI search race.

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DeepSeek Arrives at an Awkward Time, But it’s Still Amazing

If you haven’t tried DeepSeek yet, go do it right now. The app, which is a Chinese-owned AI tool designed to compete with the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini, Llama and Grok, has rocketed to the top of the App Store charts recently and for good reason. DeepSeek is special, not for its user interface or general experience, but because it shows you how it “thinks.” The company trained its model differently; frankly, I don’t fully understand how, but I trust that they did so in a way that makes it better than many other open-source models.

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