Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Saturday, September 6th.

Today on Forbes, how an AI note taker became one of the few profitable AI startups.

On a rainy July morning in a plush Amsterdam suburb, Nathan Shoe has camped out at an Italian coffee shop for a full slate of meetings.

Smiling, he asks if he can record the conversation he's about to have with the Forbes reporter

and clips a slim memory stick-sized device to a shirt.

With a click, the pill-shaped gadget starts recording, transcribing, and summarizing everything he says, and everything anyone

around him says, too. The device, made by Shue's San Francisco and Shenzhen China-based

startup Plod, can on a single charge capture 20 hours of recordings, turning that into

searchable transcripts by connecting its microphones with Plaud's own software

and a bundle of AI tools like ChatGPT.

Dubbed the Notepin, the gadget has found a fast-growing audience.

Since launching in 2023, Shue has sold over one million such devices to doctors, lawyers,

and other overworked folks with long

days and short memories. That makes plod an early frontrunner in the race to move artificial

intelligence tools out of your phone or laptop and onto your body. Shue's team has already

lapped to some early American competition, like Rabbit, and the now-defunct

humane, that promised an AI-powered helper, but delivered costly duds. Investors have plowed

close to $350 million in the space, with a new crop of startups, like Omi and Limitless

releasing wearables, while Amazon just snapped up B, a tiny note-taking

device startup for an undisclosed amount. In May, OpenAI spent a stunning $6.4 billion

to bring iPhone designer Johnny Ives' future AI device in-house. Plaud and its ilk are taking advantage of shifting norms in the tech industry, where

AI note-taking bots are increasingly common participants in a conference call.

...