Synchronizing lights is hard, so in the living room kitchen where we have 4 different lights, having a way to turn them on and off is useful. We don’t have automatic lights anywhere else, but I notice at least, where we don’t, the light switches don’t get dirty (and you don’t get dirty from using the light switch), so maybe we will make them all automatic eventually just for hygiene reasons.

They will possibly all converge when they expose a "tool interface" to some kind of model-on-prem(ish) device that you install in your home. Think of an OpenAI or Anthropic or Apple or Samsung-branded "cortex" or "brain" that controls everything to some degree using fast local models, but outsource more complex orchestration up to the cloud. Smart home products will integrate with these devices because its going to open up a whole new generation of the same devices they sell, just with AI model integration this time.

These devices already have a precedent, your apple tv or google/amazon speaker thing. I think we will see these probably become LLM/model/AI gateways in the future.