TL;DR
Personal AI will get dramatically better when it understands our lives visually. Access to photos will become the real memory layer. This is where Google and Apple will pull far ahead.
One underrated moat for personal AI assistants like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok will be access to our personal photos.
This is where Google and Apple are miles ahead with their Photos products. Gemini already demonstrates this with Personal Intelligence. Apple could unlock something similar once the Siri overhaul lands. It’s hard to imagine OpenAI or Anthropic not working on photo-driven features of their own.
Photos encode real context: where you went, who you were with, and what you care about. That’s exactly the kind of signal an assistant needs on day one to be genuinely useful.
A couple of days ago, while reading an article about the Hoover Dam, I tried Personal Intelligence in Gemini for the first time. Out of curiosity, I asked, “When did I visit the Hoover Dam?” Within seconds, it replied with the exact date and even named the friends I went with.
That same information exists somewhere in my old ChatGPT conversations too. But when context is buried deep in the past, even with memory turned on, it often misses the mark. So getting that level of accuracy from a Gemini account with only a handful of chats felt uncanny.
The assistants that truly win won’t just remember what you explicitly said. They’ll quietly observe, infer, and surface answers before you even ask. Photos will be a huge part of that shift.
You can already imagine the hardware that will amplify this: smart glasses that see your world, AI pins, and maybe even AirPods with cameras. These devices will stream visual data back to the companies building assistants, unlocking entirely new experiences.
But we don’t have to wait for new gadgets to see progress. The photo libraries we already have are a treasure trove. Tapping into them will power a new wave of personal AI long before the next generation of wearables arrives.
Originally published on X: https://x.com/sojan_official/status/2014969217871905209
