I mean a startup doing something breakthrough, that blows Home Assistant out of the water.

I'm thinking a system that figures out how to talk to devices using a mixture of hardcoded knowledge about APIs and mainstream devices, and LLMs figuring APIs out.

Something where natural language can be used to create complex automations: i.e. "when the washing machine plugged into the smart plug called Washer ends, say through the Alexas 'Washing is done'", "whenever possible, turn on the lights softly whenever they are off and someone walks into a room, then dim to off shortly after the room is empty".

LLMs can solve most of this with today's capabilities and good prompting, and I haven't done the math but with a subscription model I imagine it should be possible to cover API costs, possibly with a fair use cap.

Whenever I think about this I conclude that the limiting factor would be that you'd need hardware, but something like a raspberry pi is <100$/unit and would "just" need to be put in a nice wrapper with a speaker and a microphone (although I'm sure this is harder than I can envision), so all in all it seems doable?