凯文·罗斯对人工智能硬件提出了一项简单测试:你会想揍戴着它的人吗?

内容总结:
在近日举办的TechCrunch Disrupt大会上,资深投资人凯文·罗斯对当前人工智能硬件投资热潮发出警示。这位True Ventures普通合伙人、Peloton/Ring/Fitbit早期投资者以标志性的直率指出:"如果某款设备让你产生'想给佩戴者一拳'的冲动,那就不值得投资。"
基于对可穿戴设备领域多年的深度观察,罗斯揭示了行业反复重蹈的覆辙。当硅谷风投争相押注智能眼镜、AI胸针等设备时,他始终保持审慎。在担任智能戒指品牌Oura董事期间,他亲历了该品牌占据全球80%市场份额的历程,深刻认识到成功硬件不仅要技术过硬,更需兼顾情感共鸣与社会接受度。
"当前多数AI穿戴设备宣称'全程录音',这实际上突破了人际交往的隐私边界。"罗斯在分享与妻子的争执时坦言,"当我试图调用AI胸针的对话记录来佐证观点时,突然意识到这种技术正在扭曲人际关系。"他强调,利用技术手段回溯对话记录来解决争执的做法"完全不可取"。
针对AI技术滥用现象,罗斯举例友人使用修图工具抹除庭院栅栏的行为提出质疑:"当孩子们看着照片问'这里原来没有栅栏吗',我们该如何解释?"他将当前AI发展现状比作"社交媒体早期阶段",预言人们未来回顾时必将感叹:"当初给所有产品生硬添加AI功能的做法实在太荒谬了"。
面对AI生成内容对认知的冲击,罗斯分享了与子女的互动经历。当孩子通过Sora视频生成工具观看虚拟拉布拉多犬视频后,竟追问如何领养这些不存在的宠物。"我不得不像解释电影特效那样告诉孩子:这些小狗和银幕上会飞的超人一样,都不是真实的。"
尽管对硬件投资保持警惕,罗斯对AI推动创业变革持乐观态度。他举例称,有开发者仅用洛杉矶到旧金山的车程时间就完成整套应用开发,"半年前同样的工作需要十倍时间,还要解决数十个错误"。随着谷歌Gemini 3等工具即将面世,他预测高中生通过"意念编程"创建独角兽企业将成常态。
这种变革正在重塑风投行业逻辑。罗斯指出,创业者可以大幅推迟融资时点,甚至完全跳过外部融资。面对行业趋势,红杉资本等机构已开始大量招募工程师,但罗斯认为风投的核心价值正在回归本质:"创业者最终面临的都是非技术性难题,那些具备高情商、能长期陪伴创始人成长的老牌风投机构将更受青睐。"
在投资标准方面,罗斯始终遵循谷歌联合创始人拉里·佩奇多年前的忠告:"重要的是对'不可能'保持健康的漠视"。他特别青睐那些"不被看好的大胆构想":"即使最终未能成功,我们依然欣赏这种突破常规的思维方式,并愿意持续支持这样的创业者。"
中文翻译:
凯文·罗斯在评估AI硬件投资时有个直击灵魂的准则:"如果某款设备让你觉得佩戴者欠揍,那这项目就不该投。"
这位资深投资人的评判向来犀利,这份洞察源于他目睹当下AI硬件初创公司重蹈昔日覆辙。作为True Ventures普通合伙人、Peloton/Ring/Fitbit的早期投资人,罗斯始终远离席卷硅谷的AI硬件淘金热。当其他风投争相注资智能眼镜或AI胸针时,他选择了截然不同的路径。
"现在很多AI可穿戴设备号称要全程记录对话,"罗斯直言不讳,"但这实际上打破了人类社会的隐私边界。"这番见解来自他的切身经历——曾任智能戒指品牌Oura董事(该品牌目前占据80%市场份额),他亲眼见证过成功与失败可穿戴产品的分水岭。关键差异不仅在于技术能力,更在于情感共鸣与社会接受度。
"作为投资人,不能只关注技术炫酷与否,"他在上周TechCrunch Disrupt大会上阐述,"更要思考:它让我产生什么情感体验?周围人作何感受?当前多数AI产品缺失这种考量,它们永远在线、持续监听,试图成为全场最聪明存在,这种状态并不健康。"
他坦言试用过多种AI穿戴设备,包括一年前昙花一现的Humane AI胸针。但真正让他放弃的转折点发生在与妻子的争执中:"当我试图用AI记录佐证自己没说某句话时,突然意识到这太荒谬了。靠翻查AI记录赢得争论实在可悲——那是我最后一次佩戴该设备。"
罗斯认为旅游场景的AI应用(如通过眼镜识别景点)远远不够:"我们正把AI生硬嫁接给万物,这正在毁掉真实世界。"他举例修图软件的消除功能:"有朋友为照片美观删除了背景里的栅栏,可那是他家院子啊!孩子们日后看到照片会困惑:这里原来没有栅栏吗?"
他担忧AI正经历"社交媒体早期阶段"——当下看似无害的决策将埋下隐患。"就像我们回顾社交网络发展史会感叹'当年竟觉得给万物添加AI很明智',再过十年审视现在,我们注定会后悔。"
这种矛盾在他与年幼子女的互动中尤为凸显。当用Sora生成拉布拉多幼犬视频时,孩子们追问哪里能买到这些小狗。"我不得不解释视频里不是真实的爸爸。这种对话非常尴尬。"他的解决之道是将AI视作电影特效,让孩子明白就像演员不会真的飞行,视频里的小狗也不存在。
但罗斯绝非反技术者。他对AI重塑创业生态及风投行业抱有深切期待。"创业门槛正以肉眼可见的速度降低,"他提到有位同事在洛杉矶到旧金山车程中,零基础使用AI编程工具完成了整套应用开发,"同样任务半年前需要十倍时间,还要解决无数报错。"他预测:"三个月后Gemini 3上市时,代码错误率将趋近于零。高中编程课将变为'感觉编程',下一个独角兽企业很可能从任意中学诞生,这只是时间问题。"
这种变革正在改写风投逻辑。创业者可以延迟融资直至真正需要时,甚至完全跳过外部融资。"这将根本性改变风投世界,而且是向好发展。"对此,许多机构选择大量招募工程师(如红杉资本技术人员已与投资人员数量持平),但罗斯认为核心价值应回归更本质的维度:"创业者最终面临的从来不是技术难题,而是情感困境。那些具备高情商、能长期陪伴创始人成长、拥有行业积淀的稳健型风投,才会成为被争相追逐的合作伙伴。"
那么罗斯的投资标准是什么?他追溯到在谷歌风投任职时拉里·佩奇的忠告:"要培养对'不可能'的健康漠视。"他阐释道:"我们寻找的不是修修补补的改良者,而是敢于挑战共识的颠覆者——当所有人都说'这想法太糟了'时,他们依然坚持挥棒。即使最终失败,我们依然欣赏这种思维特质,愿意继续支持他们的下一次尝试。"
英文来源:
Kevin Rose has a visceral rule for evaluating AI hardware investments: “If you feel like you should punch someone in the face for wearing it, you probably shouldn’t invest in it.”
It’s a typically candid assessment from the veteran investor, and one born from watching the current wave of AI hardware startups repeat mistakes he’s seen before. Rose, a general partner at True Ventures and early investor in Peloton, Ring, and Fitbit, has largely avoided the AI hardware gold rush that’s consumed Silicon Valley. While other VCs rush to fund the next smart glasses or AI pendant, Rose is taking a decidedly different approach.
“A lot of it is just like, ‘Let’s listen to the entire conversation,’” Rose says of the current crop of AI wearables. “And to me, that breaks a lot of these social constructs that we have with humans around privacy.”
Rose speaks from experience. He was on the board of Oura, which now commands 80% of the smart ring market, and he’s witnessed firsthand what separates successful wearables from failed ones. The difference isn’t just technical capability; it’s emotional resonance and social acceptability.
“As an investor, you kind of have to not only say, okay, cool tech, sure, but emotionally, how does it make me feel? And how does it make others feel around me?” he explained on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt last week. “And for me, a lot of that is lost in all the AI stuff, where it’s just always on, always listening, trying to be the smartest person in the room. And it’s just not healthy.”
He admits to trying various AI wearables himself, including the failed Humane AI pendant that briefly caught the world’s attention a year ago. But the breaking point came during an argument with his wife. “I was like, I know I didn’t say that. And I was trying to use it to actually win an argument,” he recalled. “That was the last time I wore that thing. You do not want to win a battle by going back and looking at the logs of your AI pin. That doesn’t fly.”
The tourist use case — asking your glasses what monument you’re looking at — isn’t good enough, Rose said. “We tend to bolt AI onto everything and it’s ruining the world,” he said, pointing to features like photo apps that let you erase people from the background. “I had a friend who erased a gate from behind him to make the picture look better. I’m like, ‘That’s your yard! Your kids are gonna look at that and be like, ‘Didn’t we have a gate there?’”
Rose worries we’re in an “early days of social media” moment with AI — making decisions that seem harmless now but will haunt us later. “We’re gonna look back and be like, ‘Wow, that was weird. We just slapped AI on everything, and thought it was a good idea,’ similar to what happened in the early days of social. We look back a decade or two later, and you’re like, ‘I wish I would have done that differently.’”
Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist
Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector.
Join the Disrupt 2026 Waitlist
Add yourself to the Disrupt 2026 waitlist to be first in line when Early Bird tickets drop. Past Disrupts have brought Google Cloud, Netflix, Microsoft, Box, Phia, a16z, ElevenLabs, Wayve, Hugging Face, Elad Gil, and Vinod Khosla to the stages — part of 250+ industry leaders driving 200+ sessions built to fuel your growth and sharpen your edge. Plus, meet the hundreds of startups innovating across every sector.
He’s experiencing these tensions firsthand with his young children. Using OpenAI’s video generation tool Sora to create videos of tiny Labradoodles, his kids asked where they could get those puppies. “I’m like, that’s not really Dad there. How do you have that conversation? Very awkward,” he says. His solution, he said, is treating AI like movie magic, explaining that just as actors aren’t really flying on screen, Dad’s puppies aren’t real either.
But Rose isn’t a Luddite. He’s deeply optimistic about how AI is transforming entrepreneurship itself, and by extension, the venture capital industry that funds it.
“The barriers to entry for entrepreneurs are just shrinking with every day that goes by,” Rose observed. He recounted a colleague who had never used AI coding tools before building and deploying a complete app during a drive from LA to San Francisco. Six months ago, the same task would have taken ten times as long and required navigating dozens of errors.
“In three months, when [Google’s] Gemini 3 hits the market, there’s going to be zero errors or next to it,” Rose predicted. “High school coding classes are no longer coding classes — they’re vibe coding classes, and they will build the next billion-dollar business launched out of some random high school. It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.”
These developments utterly change the venture capital equation, Rose said. Entrepreneurs can now delay fundraising until they absolutely need it, or potentially skip raising outside funding altogether. “It’s really going to change the world of VC, and I think for the better,” Rose said.
Many venture firms have responded by hiring armies of engineers—Sequoia Capital, for instance, now employs as many developers as investors. But Rose doesn’t think that’s the answer. Instead, he believes the value proposition for VCs shifts to something more fundamental. “At the end of the day, the entrepreneur is going to have issues that are not technical,” he argued. “They’re very emotional problems. And so I think the VCs with the highest EQ that can show up best for the founders as their long term partner — that have been with firms and aren’t hopping around, that aren’t just fly-by-night VCs but have been around and seen these problems at scale — they’re going to be sought after.”
So what does Rose look for when making investments? He circles back to something Larry Page told him years ago when Rose was at Google Ventures, his first institutional investing job after co-founding the social news platform Digg and before joining True Ventures in 2017. “A healthy disregard for the impossible is what’s important to look for.”
“We want founders that aren’t just sanding down the rough edges, but they’re really swinging for the fences with big, bold ideas that everyone else says, ‘That is a horrible idea. Why are you doing this?’” Rose said. “That’s what I’m drawn to. Because even if it doesn’t work, we love your mind. We love where you are, and we gladly back you the second time.”
文章标题:凯文·罗斯对人工智能硬件提出了一项简单测试:你会想揍戴着它的人吗?
文章链接:https://qimuai.cn/?post=1870
本站文章均为原创,未经授权请勿用于任何商业用途