On a recent podcast, Tesla CEO Elon Musk painted a bold vision of the future: within five to six years, traditional smartphones and apps will disappear, with most content consumed by humans being generated in real time by AI.

Musk explained, “There won’t be operating systems or apps. Your phone will simply display pixels and emit sound, predicting what you want to see and hear, generating it on the spot. We will integrate AI as much as possible into this device.”

He described the future device as essentially an edge node for AI inference, equipped with wireless modules for connectivity, rather than a conventional smartphone. In this scenario, server-side AI communicates with AI on the device, generating any real-time video or content the user desires.