Speculating About the Hardware Ambitions of OpenAI ⇥ 512pixels.net
Berber Jin, Wall Street Journal:
Altman and Ive offered a few hints at the secret project they have been working on [at a staff meeting]. The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk, and will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.
Ambitious, albeit marginally less hubristic than considering it a replacement for either of those two device categories.
If OpenAI’s future product is meant to work with the iPhone and Android phones, then the company is opening a whole other set of worms, from the integration itself to the fact that most people will still prefer to simply pull their phone out of their pockets for basically any task.
I am reminded of an April 2024 article by Jason Snell at Six Colors:
The problem is that I’m dismissing the Ai Pin and looking forward to the Apple Watch specifically because of the control Apple has over its platforms. Yes, the company’s entire business model is based on tightly integrating its hardware and software, and it allows devices like the Apple Watch to exist. But that focus on tight integration comes at a cost (to everyone but Apple, anyway): Nobody else can have the access Apple has.
A problem OpenAI could have with this device is the same as was faced by Humane, which is that Apple treats third-party hardware and software as second-class citizens in its post-P.C. ecosystem. OpenAI is laying the groundwork for better individual context. But this is a significant limitation, and it is one I am curious to see how it is overcome.
Whatever this thing is, it is undeniably interesting to me. OpenAI has become a household name on a foundation of an academic-sounding product that has changed the world. Jony Ive has been the name attached to entire eras of design. There is plenty to criticize about both. Yet the combination of these things is surely intriguing, inviting the kind of speculation that used to be commonplace in tech before it all became rote. I have little faith our world will become meaningfully better with another gadget in it. Yet I hope the result is captivating, at least, because we could use some of that.