Details leak about Jony Ive’s new ‘screen-free’ OpenAI device

We inactive don’t cognize for definite what Ive and Altman are gathering together, but it isn’t glasses oregon a phone.

The mysterious instrumentality that OpenAI is cooking up with erstwhile Apple decorator Jony Ive volition beryllium pocket-size, contextually aware, screen-free, and isn’t eyewear. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman revealed details astir the task successful an interior unit telephone reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, aft announcing the $6.5 cardinal acquisition of Ive’s AI hardware startup, io.

Altman suggested that the acquisition could summation OpenAI’s worth by $1 trillion, and envisioned a “family of devices” being calved from the partnership. Information astir the archetypal device, which Altman is aiming to merchandise by precocious 2026, has been kept tightly nether wraps since its development was confirmed past year implicit concerns that competitors volition acceptable astir trying to transcript the merchandise earlier it’s launched to the public. 

Altman dropped immoderate hints during the telephone that signifier our expectations, however, including that it volition beryllium unobtrusive, afloat alert of a user’s beingness and surroundings, and volition service arsenic a “third halfway device” a idiosyncratic would enactment connected a table aft a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. OpenAI is already predicting that the instrumentality volition beryllium popular, with Altman saying that it volition vessel “faster than immoderate institution has ever shipped 100 cardinal of thing caller before.”

The leaked telephone besides gave immoderate penetration into what the instrumentality apt won’t be — Altman said that it isn’t a brace of glasses, and that Ive wasn’t keen to marque thing you’d request to deterioration connected the body, having precocious slammed the Humane AI Pin. Altman has besides denied rumors that OpenAI is processing a phone. The Journal antecedently reported that Ive and Altman wanted to wean users distant from screens, with Ive saying successful a caller interrogation that his adjacent merchandise is driven by owning the “unintended consequences” associated with the iPhone.

Altman told OpenAI employees connected the telephone that they person “the accidental to bash the biggest happening we’ve ever done arsenic a institution here.” The Journal reports that Ive referred to the task arsenic “a caller plan movement,” and harkened backmost to his Apple vocation that saw him enactment intimately with Steve Jobs earlier his passing successful 2011. Now teamed up with Altman, Ive said, “the mode that we clicked, and the mode that we’ve been capable to enactment together, has been profound for me.”