• Jony Ive and Sam Altman are teaming up to make AI hardware.
• They aren't giving many clues about what it would be like, but probably screen-free, and not a phone.
• Please, I beg you, Jony and Sam: Do not make me talk to a device in public.

I'm as curious and excited as any gadget lover to see what newfangled AI thingamabob will come from OpenAI's $6.5 billion purchase of the ex-Apple designer Jony Ive's IO company.

But I have one request: Please, for the love of God, do not make it a voice-controlled device.

Here's what we know about the possible device that Ive and Sam Altman are teasing in a video about their new collaboration. The Wall Street Journal reported that Altman told OpenAI employees a few details:

The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user's surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one's pocket or on one's desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

The Journal earlier reported that the device won't be a phone, and that Ive and Altman's intent is to help wean users from screens. Altman said that the device isn't a pair of glasses, and that Ive had been skeptical about building something to wear on the body.

Ming-Chi Kuo, a supply chain analyst who is often correct about coming hardware, says that the device may be something larger than the Humane AI Pin, and possibly worn around the neck.

I am extremely nervous that this sounds like it might be some sort of voice-controlled device.

Don't get me wrong: I'm an enthusiastic voice user of Alexa (at home) and Siri (in the car). I can see how convenient it is.

But the idea of talking to Siri while walking down the street or at a grocery store gives me hives. The idea of saying, "Hey Meta, take a picture" to activate my Ray-Bans while at a Benson Boone concert makes me want to bite my cyanide capsule. If I ever start using Siri out loud at my desk in the office, I fully accept that HR can fire me on the spot.

(Of course, voice-controlled devices are an accessibility issue for some people who are blind, have low vision, or otherwise have trouble using a screen device. I am not talking about this use, which is obviously good and a benefit. Perhaps society would be better if public use of voice devices were more normalized!)

OpenAI does seem to be interested in voice. At a demonstration over a year ago, it showed new voices that could talk to you (this was the demonstration that infamously got them in trouble with Scarlett Johansson for making a voice option suspiciously close to her own).

Meta has also embraced the idea of voice controls. Its stand-alone Meta AI app is meant for natural conversations between you and the app on your phone (though, at the moment, it's laggy and often leads to crosstalk).

It's a long-held sci-fi dream to have a supersmart AI agent you can just talk to naturally. Like Tony Stark's Jarvis, or the ScarJo voice in "Her." But even "Knight Rider" had the basic understanding that it was OK to talk to your car only in your car.

Humane's AI Pin turned out to be a disaster, partly because it just didn't work very well. Let's assume whatever OpenAI/IO is cooking up will be good at doing what it's supposed to.

Based on what the AI Pin could do, and other examples of AI assistants or devices, I can make a few guesses of what it might be able to do: listen to your work meeting and take notes for you, give you information about something you see in front of you ("What building is this?" or, "Which of these two sandwiches at Pret has more protein?"), do personal assistant tasks for you ("How much time until my next meeting?" or, "Text Hayley and tell her I'm running late.")

These all sound great and convenient! But a lot of them require something that I don't think I want to be doing: talking to my device out loud, in public, constantly.

We're at a moment in society where people are already pushing the norms of what is appropriate public device use. People are watching TikTok without headphones on the subway. Texting at the movie theater. Filming themselves at the gym. It was already weird enough when people started talking on the phone with AirPods in, making it unclear whether the person headed toward you on the sidewalk was on a call or experiencing a religious revelation. I don't think we're ready for a world where people are constantly talking to their always-on, always-listening AI devices.

So I eagerly await this device, which Altman says will sell 100 million units and be ready by the end of 2026. But please, please, do not make me talk to it in public.

• Airbnb has an ambitious new plan to help you book anything.
• It's using celebrities like Patrick Mahomes to promote its new "Experiences."
• Those "Experiences" aren't quite like the ones you'll actually book — but its new "Services" seem useful.

Airbnb is trying to expand beyond just vacation rentals — and it's enlisted some celebrities like Megan Thee Stallion and Patrick Mahomes to get some buzz going for its new offerings.

I have some questions.

It seems like these big names are only here to tout the new "Experiences" — things like throwing the pigskin with Mahomes or hanging out with Megan for the day. These all cost nothing, but go to only a handful of contest winners.

The celebs are obviously only going to be around for this promo period. After that, are people going to turn to Airbnb for a day tour of Philadelphia or a cooking class in Honolulu? Maybe. I have my doubts.

Meanwhile, another one of Airbnb's launches — called "Services" (think private chefs and photographers) — could make a lot of sense for people on vacation who need to find a trusted … well, service person.

There's also something big in all of this for Airbnb: your data. More on that later.

For now, let's look at a couple of these "Airbnb Originals" that are part of its new Experiences.

Spend a Sunday Funday with Patrick Mahomes

Toss a football and have a barbecue lunch with the Chiefs quarterback at a rental cabin near Kansas City.

Only four people (and their plus-one ) will get to do this.

Become an Otaku Hottie with Megan Thee Stallion

This is the most exciting option (to me), but also one of the more confusing ones. Twelve winners will get to make ramen with the rapper, dress up in a costume, and play Xbox with her.

The description of the actual run of events looks like this:

There are a handful of other slightly less famous celebrity experiences that do charge. Brooklyn Peltz Beckham (son of David and Victoria, son-in-law of billionaire businessman Nelson Peltz) offers a cooking demonstration for $150 per guest. Pro wrestlers Nikki and Brie Garcia offer a chance to sit in on their podcast taping for $195. Chance the Rapper is having a listening party for $110.

A rep for Airbnb told Business Insider that pricing was up to the celebrity and that another A-list celebrity would soon be doing a paid event, with the fees going to charity.

How to actually win these free experiences

There's a disconnect here between these star-studded promotional things and the new Experiences Airbnb is trying to promote. These are largely contests to win a free prize, not an experience or service you pay for.

It's not unlike a classic radio station contest where the 25th caller gets to meet Paul Stanley, or the 1990s MTV contests where suburban teens can win the chance for a big band to perform in their backyard.

The actual product Airbnb is launching is more practical and down-to-earth: high-quality tours and food experiences from vetted providers.

Even charging a nominal amount makes these celebrity experiences very different. Airbnb subsidizes the event, likely cutting the celebrity a big check to participate. This is a different business model from the regular tour guides, who make their money from customers.

A prompt to fill out your user bio with more information

Well, there is something that makes sense about all of this. I figured it out when I started the process to sign up for Megan Thee Stallion's event on the Airbnb app.

It's about getting your sweet, sweet data.

As part of my application process, I was asked to continue to fill out my user bio — adding things like my favorite song from high school, my hobbies, where I went to school, and my pet's name (as a tech journalist, I must warn you here not to put information in a public bio that is commonly used for password reminder questions).

Tens of thousands of people want to hang out with Patrick Mahomes and Megan Thee Stallion. Only a handful will get to, but many will fill out their expanded bios, giving Airbnb lots of information on prospective users.

These expanded bios are part of Airbnb's new ambitious rebrand: to be a place not just for vacation rentals, but for people to hire other people for anything. And part of that is building out is convincing customers to make personalized bios, so that the vendors can better see who they're dealing with and vice versa.

I think the new feature called Services actually seems like a great idea — things like a hair stylist or makeup artist to come to your home or Airbnb rental for a big event are the kind of things people only want once in a while. And it will certainly open up tons of opportunities for chefs, trainers, stylists, etc., to get themselves in front of more clients.

But the Experiences? I'm not sure what this will all look like in a year after the celebrity buzz has died down.

• Facebook is testing a downvote feature for comment sections. It's designed to cut down on spam.
• It would allow you to downvote comments that aren't "useful."
• Facebook has tested a dislike or downvote button before, but it never stuck. Will this be different?

Mark Zuckerberg has vowed to make Facebook great again, and Meta announced a tiny new feature that might be a step toward that goal.

As part of a series of features and policies aiming to cut down on spammy content, Facebook is testing a "downvote" button for comment sections. This would allow people to anonymously downvote comments that they deem less "useful."

This wouldn't be the first time something like this has come up. For nearly as long as the "like" button has existed (since 2009), the masses have yearned for a "dislike" button. Meta has toyed around with testing a feature like this, but ultimately has never done it.

Back in 2016, Facebook added the extra "reaction" emojis (smiling, laughing, hugging, loving). Geoff Teehan, a product design director at Facebook at the time, wrote a Medium post in 2016: "About a year ago, Mark [Zuckerberg] brought together a team of people to start thinking seriously about how to make the Like button more expressive."

Teehan explained why they went with additional reactions instead of just a "thumbs down" emoji:

We first needed to consider how many different reactions we should include. This might seem like a pretty straightforward task: Just slap a thumbs down next to the Like button and ship it. It's not nearly that simple though.

People need a much higher degree of sophistication and richness in what choices we provide for their communications. Binary 'like' and 'dislike' doesn't properly reflect how we react to the vast array of things we encounter in our real lives.

In 2017, Facebook also tested out a "thumbs down" reaction button for Messenger. This would've been similar to the Apple iMessage reactions that launched in the fall of 2016 and included a thumbs-down emoji.

Instagram has also considered something like this. In February of this year, Instagram head Adam Mosseri posted about a test of downvoting Instagram comments:

But will people understand what the downvote arrow actually means? Will they use it on comments that are extraneous and actually not "useful," or will they use it to try to crush comments they don't agree with or don't like?

I asked Meta about this, and a spokesperson told me that, unlike past tests of a dislike or thumbs-down button, this test will explicitly tell users that it's about being useful —a little text bubble below the button will say, "Let us know which comments aren't useful."

The test is still just a test. It might not actually end up being rolled out. Personally, I think that less-useful comments are less of a burning issue than some of the other AI-slop stuff on Facebook. (Facebook is working on combating some of that, too.) But hey, that's just my questionably useful comment.

• Google's AI answers will give you a definition of any made-up saying. I tried: "You can't lick a badger twice."
• This is exactly the kind of thing AI should be really good at — explaining language use. But something's off.
• Is it a hallucination, or AI just being too eager to please?

What does "You can't lick a badger twice" mean?

Like many English sayings — "A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush," "A watched pot never boils" — it isn't even true. Frankly, nothing stops you from licking a badger as often as you'd like, although I don't recommend it.

(I'm sure Business Insider's lawyers would like me to insist you exercise caution when encountering wildlife, and that we cannot be held liable for any rabies infections.)

If the phrase doesn't ring a bell to you, it's because, unlike "rings a bell," it is not actually a genuine saying — or idiom — in the English language.

But Google's AI Overview sure thinks it's real, and will happily give you a detailed answer of what the phrase means.

Greg Jenner, a British historian and podcaster, saw people talking about this phenomenon on Threads and wanted to try it himself with a made-up idiom. The badger phrase "just popped into my head," he told Business Insider. His Google search spit out an answer that seemed reasonable.

I wanted to try this myself, so I made up a few fake phrases — like "You can't fit a duck in a pencil" — and added "meaning" onto my search query.

Google took me seriously and explained:

So I tried some others, like "The Road is full of salsa." (This one I'd like to see being used in real life, personally.)

A Google spokeswoman told me, basically, that its AI systems are trying their best to give you what you want — but that when people purposely try to play games, sometimes the AI can't exactly keep up.

"When people do nonsensical or 'false premise' searches, our systems will try to find the most relevant results based on the limited web content available," spokeswoman Meghann Farnsworth said.

"This is true of Search overall — and in some cases, AI Overviews will also trigger in an effort to provide helpful context."

Basically, AI Overviews aren't perfect (duh), and these fake idioms are "false premise" searches that are purposely intended to trip it up (fair enough).

Google does try to limit the AI Overviews from answering things that are "data voids," i.e., when there are no good web results to a question.

But clearly, it doesn't always work.

I have some ideas about what's going on here — some of it is good and useful, some of it isn't. As one might even say, it's a mixed bag.

But first, one more made-up phrase that Google tried hard to find meaning for: "Don't kiss the doorknob." Says Google's AI Overview:

So what's going on here?

The Good:

English is full of idioms like "kick the bucket" or "piece of cake." These can be confusing if English isn't your first language (and frankly, they're often confusing for native speakers, too). My case in point is that the phrase is commonly misstated as "case and point."

So it makes lots of sense that people would often be Googling to understand the meaning of a phrase they came across that they don't understand. And in theory, this is a great use for the AI Overview answers: You want to see the simply-stated answer right away, not click on a link.

The Bad:

AI should be really good at this particular thing. LLMs are trained on vast amounts of the English written language — reams of books, websites, YouTube transcriptions, etc., so being able to recognize idioms is something they should be very good at doing.

The fact that it's making mistakes here is not ideal. What's going wrong that Google's AI Overview isn't giving the real answer, which is "That isn't a phrase, you idiot"? Is it just a classic AI hallucination?

The ugly:

Comparatively, ChatGPT gave a better answer when I asked it about the badger phrase. It told me that it was not a standard English idiom, even though it had the vaguely folksy sound of one. Then it offered, "If we treat it like a real idiom (for fun)," and gave a possible definition.

So this isn't a problem across all AI — it seems to be a Google problem.

This is somewhat different from last year's Google AI Overview answers fiasco where the results pulled in information from places like Reddit without considering sarcasm — remember when it suggested people should eat rocks for minerals or put glue in their pizza (someone on Reddit had once joked about glue in pizza, which seems to be where it drew from).

This is all very low-stakes and silly fun, making up fake phrases, but it speaks to the bigger, uglier problems with AI becoming more and more enmeshed in how we use the internet. It means Google searches are somehow worse, and since people start to rely on these more and more, that bad information is just getting out there into the world and taken as fact.

Sure, AI search will get better and more accurate, but what growing pains will we endure while we're in this middle phase of a kinda wonky, kinda garbage-y, slop-filled AI internet?

AI is here, it's already changing our lives. There's no going back, the horse has left the barn. Or as they say, you can't lick a badger twice.