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Before people get all up in arms about the non-replaceable battery... Do you know how small a LEGO brick is? For them to pack all this functionality in there, they have to be EXTREMELY careful with how they use every millimeter of space, and they have to make sure a kid won't just... pop open the bottom of the brick and eat the battery or something.
The article itself even states:
Break even one of them and the entire brick is nonfunctional.
Turns out there's not actually much functionality in these at all. An RFID reader and an RGB LED, whoop-de-shit.
Here's an example of what cutting-edge brick tech could look like.
Where did you get that idea? They have an RFID reader and LED, yes, but they also have a speaker, microphone, accelerometer, light and color sensor, near-field magnetic position detection, and then have to fit the battery alongside all of that, all in a 2x4 brick.
That brick has a fixed option for what it displays without needing to be entirely reflashed, requires a 4x8 powered baseplate to operate, and compared to the smart brick, doesn't have RFID, LEDs, sound, color, or light sensing capabilities, no accelerometer, and no ability to detect other bricks near it, along with having no internal battery.
The smart brick can play different (fully interchangeable without firmware reflashing) sounds based on nearby minifigures and interactable buttons and levers, can display lights and sounds based on rotation and movement, can change how it interacts based on nearby smart bricks, and can also be charged wirelessly and operate standalone. And of course, it'll be able to respond to sounds later on too.
The brick from hackaday has a display. That's it. It's cool, yes, but it's nowhere close to the smart brick.
OK, looks like they actually integrated the speaker, which wasn't clear at the initial reveal. That's an improvement. The rest of the sensors fit in basically zero space, so that's not so impressive, especially since a 2x4 brick has about triple the internal volume as a 2x2 slope brick.
It's a 72x40 OLED display, so that's actually 2,880 LEDs, on the order of 1,000× as many LEDs as a single RGB LED.
It can also play Doom.