Quick Thoughts on CES 2025

We made our annual pilgrimage of self-punishment to the CES this year. We have a long history of deeply mixed feelings about this show, going back decades. This year was more of the same – lots of information, and also too much information.

One thing that particularly stood out for us this year was the lack of AI. This will confound anyone who was there, because seemingly every product on display had “AI” worked into it somehow. But this “AI” is not really AI. To be clear, this trend has been prominent for many years, and really went wild at CES 2023 right after ChatGPT’s launch. But for a long time now, any consumer gadget with even a mild dose of software got an “AI” label in its marketing material. This is not LLMs, Chatbots, or even really machine learning. It is just software.

What struck us this year was that we saw almost no devices with even rudimentary Chat GPT capabilities. The vast majority of “AI” devices were still operating at a level of just having some rudimentary software algorithms programmed in. Going into the show we expected to see many devices that could chat with users, answer basic questions or converse. But there were very few on display.

To be clear, we maintain that actual AI’s big problem is the lack of consumer use cases, but the consumer electronics industry has not even reached that point yet. So while there were robots that used “AI” to clean pools, and “AI” toothbrushes, and no end of “smart glasses”, these are all still using pre-2022 software.

This is interesting for a few reasons. Last year, we actually saw many attempts at integrating large language models into devices – remember the Rabbit and the Humane Pin? Those products fizzled out and the industry took notice. The consumer electronics industry has moved backwards in its adoption of AI. With even Apple struggling to find compelling uses for AI, everyone else is taking their time too.

Two places where AI was more prominent were PCs and vehicles. This is the first year when “AI” PCs will be widely on sale. So that corner of the show had a lot AI marketing going on, but little in the way of anything actually useful. The biggest advances for what we would call true AI were in the West Hall with the automotive vendors. And to be clear, this was not really about cars. Instead we saw some real progress for autonomous tractors, bulldozers and lawn mowers. And while John Deere remains in the lead, Kubota, Catepillar, Oshkosh and their peers are all making progress as well.

That being said, the broader consumer gadget industry is a full two cycles behind state of the art AI. And while that software continues to make incredible advances, the broader electronics industry is still searching.