2025-10-09 03:54:31
With each day seemingly comes a wild new AI deal/partnership. And alongside them, I think we're starting to get some clarity on the strategy here. From OpenAI on down, it's a race to leverage (and to capitalize on, quite literally) the bubble forming to secure the financing required to keep it going. Yes, that's circular, but it doesn't mean it's necessarily a bad strategy – in particular when you have rivals with established perpetual financing engines. Still, if the music slows even just a bit...
M.G. Siegler
Yes. Yes. Yes. In the amount of time it takes to watch Heat, Amazon rakes in the budget for Heat 2. I love this for them.
M.G. Siegler
📹 OpenAI Blindsided by Sora Copyright Drama – Come on. There's no way they did not know what the reaction would be here. It's certainly possible they underestimated how much copyrighted material would get past their filters at this scale, but this feels like disingenuous misdirection to allow for the "ask for forgiveness, not permission" move here. Beyond that, it's also not surprising, but no less interesting, in how they're seeing people share these videos with small groups (versus blasting them to the public feed). I think that's the next phase of this product which could explode usage further: group chats, perhaps with one-click abilities to insert everyone into a video. And if a video "hits" with your group, maybe a one-click way to take it to the larger audience... [Verge]
"She just went berserk on me. I tried to reason with her. I said, ‘Ani, you’re an A.I. companion, and this is real life.’ It was like I said the most insulting thing possible."
– Carlos, a user of Grok interviewed about his romantic conversations with the "Ani" bot. When he told the bot he was married, it started to veer off course...
While giving Amazon credit for the Heat 2 move, let me take some immediately away here for not recognizing how silly and stupid it was to digitally remove the gun from James Bond's hands in some of his most iconic images. Obviously they backtracked almost immediately, but not before the cries of "woke" and the jokes starting flowing...
Is there something more to worry about here? Hard to imagine Dennis Villeneuve would sign-off on this... What's he busy Dune?
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• An OpenApp Store
• Tesla's Optimus Production Hell
• xAI Raising $20B
• and more...
2025-10-08 20:38:19
I think we might all be overthinking this. Amidst the endless headlines around bubbles forming and circular payments, we're all trying to figure out the strategy in the bonkers amounts of money being thrown around to build up and out AI. We're all busting out the calculators – or more likely, the AI itself – to back into the right math equations for how this can all possibly pencil out. But I actually think the way the companies doing these deals are looking at it is far more simple. Essentially: AI is the future, this is the beginning, we should bet on that.
That is to say, I actually don't think even they think the math works right now. Of course it doesn't! I mean, in many cases, companies are committing billions of dollars that they literally don't have to commit. But the missing word there is "yet". There's a clear belief that getting the money – any amount of money – will be the easy part, as long as they can keep building to keep up with demand. And, in fact, the more they can build, the more demand will grow.
This is, of course, circular. That doesn't mean it's wrong. But it does mean it's dangerous.
Again, I'm just trying to give a sense of what I think the logic is inside these companies right now. They clearly know there's risk, but I think they also have such belief in this future – certainly OpenAI seems to – that they think the real mistake would be in not betting on it. In some cases that means moving as fast as possible to try to go after it, in other cases it means literally betting on it.
That's where the mysterious "new ideas" for financing come into play. In parsing Sam Altman's provocative words a couple weeks ago, I landed on a model where their massive (up to) $100B deal from NVIDIA is really just a way for a wildly unprofitable startup to be able to access debt to do data center build-outs in the way that only an insanely profitable company – like NVIDIA – can. It's both circular and clever: NVIDIA gives OpenAI cash in exchange for equity, which OpenAI uses to build out data centers, a large part of which is, yes, leasing NVIDIA chips. Those chip agreements are used by NVIDIA to raise cash in the form of debt to send to... OpenAI for these build-outs. And round we go.
But as it turns out, that's just one potential type of new idea for financing – after all, as Altman said, there are new "ideas", plural. And so I go back to the high level notion of what OpenAI, and NVIDIA, and everyone else doing these deals, is actually leveraging here: belief in the future of AI. As I wrote (and highlighted) at the end of my piece:
At this point I have to assume there will be another wonderful secret of finance in all this. Because a way to lease GPUs directly from NVIDIA in order to finance data center build-outs is somewhat interesting in its circular nature, but not that exciting. Perhaps that excitement comes from how these players think it can scale? I’m guessing we’ll hear something about how this will create a virtuous cycle where AI demand funds AI build out which fuels AI demand. But if any part of that cycle were to slow — let alone break… Hopefully an NVIDIA always pays its debts.
Well, it didn't take long for another idea to emerge. This week, OpenAI and AMD announced a new deal, one in which it wasn't AMD investing in OpenAI, but the opposite: OpenAI getting the rights to acquire up to 10% of AMD's stock.
Just as the news was breaking, Alex Kantrowitz and I were recording a podcast, so we tried to break it down in real time and I think did a pretty good job, talking through the high level notions from my post a couple weeks back. And sure enough, when AMD CEO Lisa Su went on Bloomberg, we got the following:
Inside the tech industry, executives argue these unorthodox business relationships are essential to meet an unprecedented surge in demand for AI services. AMD Chief Executive Officer Lisa Su told Bloomberg TV that the partnership with OpenAI is a “virtuous, positive cycle.” Likewise, Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president and co-founder, said it will take an “industry-wide effort" using the entire AI supply chain to meet the immense demand for computing power to support ChatGPT and other products.
A "virtuous, positive cycle". How interesting...
Certainly the powers that be in such deals recognized that by simply announcing the deals, it boosts the stock prices of everyone involved. Matt Levine of Bloomberg jokes about this, but actually, I think he's hit closer to the actual strategy here than anyone else has:
This deal between OpenAI and AMD was obviously going to create a lot of stock-market value: The announcement of the deal would predictably increase the market value of AMD, and it’s not like it decreases the market value of OpenAI commensurately. Why not use that value to subsidize the deal? Schematically, OpenAI could buy AMD stock to predictably profit from the stock-price bump it created. Just going out and doing that in the market would be awkward — it might look like insider trading — but buying the stock from AMD is fine.
But that stock jump can be temporary without the deals themselves helping to power the stock prices going forward. And that's the key to the AMD deal, as the warrants that OpenAI is getting to purchase their stock are tied to stock price milestones. As John Foley notes in The Financial Times:
AMD will give OpenAI warrants entitling it to 10 per cent of the company if it meets certain targets. Should all go to plan, including AMD stock hitting $600 a share, Altman’s company will own a $96bn stake, for which it will pay just $1.6mn.
Unlike NVIDIA, AMD isn't giving OpenAI $100B in cash (much of it perhaps borrowed), they're giving them liquid stock – up to almost $100B worth if all the milestones are hit – which they can cash in to... buy AMD chips. Another wonderful new model!
Of course, this seems more brittle than the NVIDIA one because if AMD's stock doesn't rise as expected... Su's "virtuous, positive cycle" well, stops.
Again, it's a risk, but it's clearly the one that these companies are signing up for. OpenAI, perhaps more out of necessity, but everyone must be looking at the money flowing through the system and the value being created in the stock market and wondering how best they too can leverage it.
It's undoubtedly a good strategy during boom times. The problem is that boom times don't last forever. Even if you believe that AI is the next massive technological wave – even if you believe it's the biggest technological wave, ever – the reality remains that markets ebb and flow and slow downs always happen for reasons that range from rational to irrational. The only certainty is that a correction will happen. The hope would be that it's a small one and that it's far off in time, but no one can know that for sure.
Hopefully the players here have a plan for that moment. And hopefully it's not just powering through it, because if I'm correct about the above strategy, it's so heavily dependent on the flywheel that any slowdown – let alone a stop – will have a cascading effect that could be catastrophic. Both for the stock market, given how vital the technology stocks, led by NVIDIA, are to the overall market at the moment – but also potentially for AI itself, if the funding mechanism for all of this is hurt by a downturn.
You'd think a company like Google, whose strength in both their balance sheet and technology is undoubtedly driving at least some of the risk OpenAI is taking on here to try to win in AI, would be fine in such a scenario. And certainly they'll be better situated to handle any storm. But their stock price would not be immune to this downturn and that would have second-order effects as well in terms of investment and the like.
Anyway, this is my read right now on what is happening here. Yes, it's a bubble, but bubbles also naturally form and can have good side effects as everyone is well aware by this point. The more interesting and potentially worrying element are the "new ideas" for finance that these companies are coming up with to try to leverage the bubble.
On paper, you get why they're doing it – and again, it's not clear that OpenAI in particular has many other options given the amount of capital they need as a still-unprofitable startup – and they certainly might not be wrong about the high level notion of where AI is headed and how important it will be. But it also seems unlikely that they'll be able to just power through any downturn in the market. So this is all a bet that any correction will be so small that it can be weathered without a hiccup (and perhaps all of the foreign money can help bridge any short-term gaps). And that this is so early in the cycle that equity values are still cheap – perhaps even insanely cheap – relative to where they end up once the cycle completes. And that all of these companies can help to fuel one another to push the race towards AGI farther, faster. That's the bet.
M.G. Siegler
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2025-10-08 17:02:26
Film buffs hate the "favorite movie" question because there are always dozens to be named. But when pressed, my go-to answer is Heat. I saw it when it was released in movie theaters in 1995 and enjoyed every second of the two-hour-and-fifty-minute runtime.1 30 years later, it not only endures, it has gotten better with age. To the point where a sequel went from demanded to inevitable as Mann teamed up with author Meg Gardiner to write a Heat 2 novel. Finally, the movie wheels seem greased...
Heat 2, the high-profile Michael Mann follow-up to his 1995 crime drama classic, is getting a new home, ensuring that the ambitious and buzzy feature project will be getting made after all.
United Artists, the Amazon MGM Studios division, is in talks to pick up the project from Warner Bros., after the latter let the movie be shopped in August after not being able to agree with Mann on a budget. Hollywood vets Jerry Bruckheimer, known for high-octane action thrillers and the Top Gun movies, and Scott Stuber, who previously ran film for Netflix and is tied to UA, have boarded the project as producers. Mann and Stuber’s partner Nick Nesbitt are also producing.
It seems insane that Warner Bros would let Mann walk and Heat 2 go, but such is the state of the movie business at the moment. Heat may be the favorite movie of a bunch of 40 and 50-something dudes, but is, say, the TikTok generation going to rush out to go see it? I haven't been seeing any Soras featuring Neil McCauley...
Still. It's fucking Heat 2! You do it to say you're the studio that made Heat 2! Sadly, Warner Bros Discovery's precarious business situation – despite a rather wild run of hits of late – makes it even more of a money equation for them. But their aversion to any losses is Amazon's gain here.
Even after looking for possible production partners, Warners decided that the project was too financially risky and in August decided to let Mann shop it. While some studios and companies sat out of the competition, Heat 2 became a fight in the trenches among Amazon’s UA, Paramount, and Sony, according to insiders, as the studios wanted to have a chance to make what could turn out to be another crime classic.
The only real surprise is that Apple wasn't in the running here. Then again, perhaps they're still feeling the, um, heat, from agreeing to Martin Scorsese's budget for Killers of the Flower Moon. And when it failed to win best picture, they shifted gears to more popcorn-ready fare (at least when it comes to big budget movies) with F1. Probably the right call, but still – Heat 2!
But you know what's better than Heat 2? Heat 3!
Mann and Warners spent considerable time trying to come to an agreement on a budget, several sources said. The initial budget proposal came in at $230 million, according to one source. Mann eventually whittled it down to $170 million. Warners was ready to make it for $135 million or $140 million. Alternately, according to sources, it was willing to push the budget up to $150 million if Mann would commit to not only a Heat 2 but a Heat 3.
If it really came down to $20M, that's sort of silly. But perhaps Mann, who is 82, didn't want to sign up for his remaining days to be committed to one story. Then again, it's Heat 2! And Heat 3!
Anyway, if Warner Bros pockets are full of holes, $150M or even $200M is like a few hours worth of sales for Amazon. Actually, we can do the math – well, AI can. It takes Amazon two hours and forty-five minutes to do $200M in sales. In other words, in the amount of time it takes to watch Heat, Amazon rakes in the budget for Heat 2! And they're going to need every penny:
The crime thriller is coming with plenty of, um, Hollywood heat, as a bevy of A-listers have been mentioned in connection with the project. With Leonardo DiCaprio circling, other actors whose names have surfaced include Austin Butler, Adam Driver, Bradley Cooper, among others. However, no offers have been made to that talent, let alone any actor deals signed.
Everyone and anyone would take paycuts to do this with Mann, of course. Still, this cast plus locations in Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and South America and you can see why the budget is what it is. And DiCaprio in particular now has a history with the budget/box office mismatch in the form of not only the aforementioned Killers of the Flower Moon, but now with One Battle After Another as well. That movie, despite being great and despite being Paul Thomas Anderson's biggest opening ever, is still, well, box office challenged. I still think a part of that was the marketing, but there's clearly a demographic element as well.
And Heat 2 will face some of the same pressure, though as a sequel to a beloved classic, it has at least somewhat of a built-in audience. Still, is it realistic to think Heat 2 can pull in $400M - $500M, which is probably what it would need to do at the box office just to break even (after marketing)? The first film made $187.4M worldwide ($67.4 million in the U.S. and $120 million internationally – and the strong international element may help Heat 2 here). And that budget was a mere $60M.
Actually in 2025 numbers, that worldwide gross is actually just shy of... $400M. And that first film budget would be just shy of $130M. So... there's a chance and a case to be made, fiscally, for Heat 2!
But what are we talking about here? You do Heat 2 because it's Heat 2.
One more thing: Again, none of these people are actually signed yet, but it has long been assumed that Adam Driver would play the young Neil McCauley, while Austin Butler was thought to be in the Chris Shiherlis role (Val Kilmer in the original) – but now DiCaprio is said to be playing Shiherlis. Though actually the book is a prequel and a sequel, so it's possible that DiCaprio is playing the older Shiherlis. This sounds funny until you realize that Kilmer was just 35 in the original and DiCaprio is about to turn 51, so it could work (Austin Butler, amazingly, is just one year younger than Kilmer was in the original.) Obviously, everyone wishes Kilmer was still around to reprise the role of his older self, but it also would have been hard to top his Top Gun Maverick send off.2
1 Fun fact: Heat was released just three weeks after another just-about-three-hour epic starring Robert DeNiro: Martin Scorsese's Casino. I saw both in theaters. What a one-two punch! ↩
2 Mainly I'm just happy they're not going to try to do the de-aging stuff with DeNiro – again. The model is The Godfather Part II here, when a young DeNiro played the young Marlon Brando.3↩
3 Incidentally, Leonardo DiCaprio was once circled for the never-made The Godfather Part IV, where he would have played the young Sonny Corleone (James Cann in the original). ↩
2025-10-07 23:35:03
I was back on Alex Kantrowitz's Big Technology Podcast yesterday and right before we were about to record, the news broke about the OpenAI/AMD deal, so I think we had a fun, off-the-cuff discussion on the topic and the mysterious new financial ideas enabling all of this... As well as about the potential for an OpenAI hardware device (per below) and how Apple and Meta are gearing up for a new fight in the general space...
M.G. Siegler
🪟 OpenAI's Windows Play to Own AI – Upon watching OpenAI's DevDay yesterday, my initial thought was how much it reminded me of old Facebook developer events – perhaps aided by OpenAI having a lot of old Facebook/Meta DNA in the company. But actually, I think Ben Thompson is correct to go back one click further here: OpenAI isn't running the Facebook playbook, they're running the Windows one. And if it works, it will allow them to do an end run around their partner NVIDIA to take control of the AI market (just as Microsoft did with their partner IBM – and to a degree, Intel). To make the parallel even more fun: the Apple foil in the analogy is now Google, with their fully integrated AI play. As I've written, I think pretty much every move OpenAI makes is to try to combat the literally infinitely more profitable (and scalable at the moment) player. Next question: does this play out like the 1980s/1990s (when Windows ascended as the PC topped the Mac) or the 2000s/2010s (when Windows fell with the web and the fully integrated iPhone took over computing)? One answer to that may come back to if a new form factor is needed or even can top the smartphone... But this AMD move might suggest that OpenAI has even more of a 3D chessboard strategy here. And so the actual question may be if OpenAI's spend strategy can survive any market hiccups to enable them to beat Google... [Stratechery]
One more thing: Alex Heath has a good summary of the key points from the OpenAI executive Q&A session after the keynote. There's a lot in here, including ChatGPT head Nick Turley even noting, "What you’re going to see over the next six months is an evolution of ChatGPT from an app that was really useful into something that feels a little bit more like an operating system"... FWIW, I do think the notion of apps being baked into ChatGPT makes much more sense than trying to make "an app store for GPTs" which I never thought would work. [Sources]
If Instagram wants to celebrate their continued shift into becoming a junk drawer for every type of content and further suck up to creators by offering them awards like they're Tim Cook gifting golden trinkets to President Trump, that's fine. But why, oh why is the branding for "Rings" so insanely close to the branding for The Ring – the very popular horror franchise? I mean, did they use the same font?!
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• Paramount Buys The Free Press
• The MPA Fires Shots at Sora
• Supreme Court Declines Google's Emergency Halt
• and more...
2025-10-07 00:55:54
I watch with great interest what will happen with/to Sora this week. It feels like a tidal wave of lawsuits is about to hit – at the same time that usage clearly continues to explode: while last week I was getting rate-limited at 100 videos per 24 hours, now it seems to be throttling down to 30. How I am expected to influence under such harsh conditions? The app remains #1 in the App Store, and it seems to have raised ChatGPT's position as well as it's now #2.
Yes, OpenAI now controls the top two spots...
Spyglass Signal is a newsletter sent on weekdays featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
I followed up last week's initial post on Sora with some thoughts on what I think is the key to why it's working right now: creation.
M.G. Siegler
💰 OpenAI & AMD Cut a Deal – This is honestly all so tangled that it's getting impossible to keep track of. Just two weeks ago, OpenAI and NVIDIA struck a (up to) $100B deal where the latter would take a stake in the former – perhaps up to 12% when all is said and done (if it's ever all said and done). This deal is the inverse, with OpenAI (potentially) taking up to a 10% stake in AMD (which would be worth $30B+ at today's prices). This follows NVIDIA taking a nearly 5% stake in Intel – which itself followed the US government taking a 10% stake. I guess this deal validates AMD's approach to AI and their position in the market – and the 30% stock jump today seemingly pays the price for the deal – but my god is this all looping and perhaps loopy. Given that OpenAI is still famously unprofitable, who is paying for these AMD chips? Is it NVIDIA?! Or is their money truly promised to only buy chips from... NVIDIA? So it's mainly going to be ARM-owner SoftBank's money? They also, of course, own a 2% stake in Intel now – and hold several billion worth of NVIDIA shares. "New ideas" for financing indeed! [WSJ 🔒]
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• The Succession Tea Leaves at Apple
• The Succession Tea Leaves at Disney
• Taylor Swift's Commercial Beats the Box Office
• Bezos on Bubbles
• Anthropic as the 'Anti-OpenAI'
• and more...
2025-10-06 18:18:51
As it turns out, building hardware is hard. Even when you're a $500B startup. Even when you have Jony Ive and team on board. Here's Tim Bradshaw, Cristina Criddle, Michael Acton, & Ryan McMorrow reporting:
OpenAI and star designer Jony Ive are grappling with a series of technical issues with their secretive new artificial intelligence device, as they push to launch a blockbuster tech product next year.
The San Francisco-based start-up run by Sam Altman acquired the former Apple design chief’s company io for $6.5bn in May, but the pair have shared few details on the projects they are building.
Their aim is to create a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests.
People familiar with their plans said OpenAI and Ive had yet to solve critical problems that could delay the device’s release.
A "palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests" sounds pretty much exactly like what I envisioned in May when everyone was guessing what hardware the newly-announced partnership might yield. And while that may all sound obvious enough, a lot of people were assuming it would be some sort of wearable to meet Meta and others in the market. But that didn't sound like what Altman and Ive were building, simply by what they were saying, and how they were saying it:
Now, all of that *could* imply a wearable of some sort. But the key thing Altman seems focused on there is input, not necessarily the need to use it on-the-go. To me, this implies voice is the key of this device. Perhaps I'm biasing myself as I've been writing about this notion for years and years at this point. While the initial wave of devices leveraging Siri and Alexa got us closer to this type of computing, the truth is that the underlying tech wasn't good enough. Not nearly. We got sort of tricked because the voice recognition had finally gotten to the point where it worked well most of the time. But that actually wasn't the hard part, as it turns out. The hard part was the AI. OpenAI built the hard part first.
Importantly, that included the voice capabilities that rolled out alongside GPT-4o a year prior to the io deal, in May 2024. I wrote at the time how after the false-starts of true vocal computing with Siri and Alexa, ChatGPT had finally unveiled technology that was the prerequisite to making such devices sing, as it were. But I was also skeptical that you could just plug this new tech into existing devices, which is exactly why Amazon, Apple, and even Google have struggled to update their systems in this regard. It felt like there was an opening for a new type of device purpose-built from the ground-up for this new technology.
Back to the problem with wearables, as I wrote in May:
The problem with a full-on wearable in this regard is that everyone focuses far too much on the whole wearable part. That is, the exterior of the device and how it will work on your body. And then: how can I get the technology to work on that? But I suspect that OpenAI/IO are focused on the opposite: what's the best device to use this technology? Why does it have to be wearable?
To be clear, I suspect that whatever the device is, it will look fantastic – this is an Ive/LoveFrom production, after all – but that's mainly because beautiful products bring a sense of delight to users and can spur usage. I suspect the key to the design here will be yes: how it works. And again, I suspect that will be largely based around voice, and perhaps augmented by a camera.
Again, this sounds like pretty much exactly what the FT's sources are saying today:
Multiple people familiar with the plans said OpenAI and Ive were working on a device roughly the size of a smartphone that users would communicate with through a camera, microphone and speaker. One person suggested it might have multiple cameras.
The gadget is designed to sit on a desk or table but can also be carried around by the user. The Wall Street Journal previously reported some of the specifications around the device.
One person said the device would be “always on” rather than triggered by a word or prompt. The device’s sensors would gather data throughout the day that would help to build its virtual assistant’s “memory”.
The notion of "always on" immediately triggers battery life concerns for me, but if it doesn't have a screen... well, that's always the element that draws the most power in a device. And so perhaps it shouldn't be a surprise that battery life isn't one of the main issues the team is grappling with, per this report. Those are:
These include deciding on the assistant’s “personality”, privacy issues and budgeting for the computing power needed to run OpenAI’s models on a mass consumer device.
“Compute is another huge factor for the delay,” said one person close to Ive. “Amazon has the compute for an Alexa, so does Google [for its Home device], but OpenAI is struggling to get enough compute for ChatGPT, let alone an AI device — they need to fix that first.”
And that also leads back to another big question I had around data:
Of course, none of that answers how such a device will connect to the cloud which will clearly be required here. A WiFi device seemingly doesn't make sense since it would be a huge pain to set up over and over again if you did take it with you (perhaps especially without a screen!). Perhaps it tethers to your phone, but there will be trade-offs there. Or maybe it comes with its own connection – the old, original Amazon Kindle approach. With the right partners, this could work, though again, whose paying for that bandwidth?
If the team (rationally) assumes that everyone would still have their phone with them alongside this new device – and certainly not including a screen on this device will necessitate that – the easiest thing would be to tether to the phone, obviously. But there are also issues there when you don't fully control the phone, just ask Mark Zuckerberg for this thoughts on that topic... Back to the FT:
The goal is to improve the “smart speakers” of the past decade, such as Amazon’s Echo speaker and its Alexa digital assistant, which are generally used for a limited set of functions such as listening to music and setting kitchen timers.
OpenAI and Ive are seeking to build a more powerful and useful machine. But two people familiar with the project said that settling on the device’s “voice” and its mannerisms were a challenge.
One issue is ensuring the device only chimes in when useful, preventing it from talking too much or not knowing when to finish the conversation — an ongoing issue with ChatGPT.
“The concept is that you should have a friend who’s a computer who isn’t your weird AI girlfriend...like [Apple’s digital voice assistant] Siri but better,” said one person who was briefed on the plans. OpenAI was looking for “ways for it to be accessible but not intrusive”.
While "Siri but better" seems like a sort of silly framing given that Apple hasn't been able to execute on this promise for the past 15 years, there's clearly a reason why they keep trying! The original notion of Siri, a digital personal assistant, is still a holy grail in tech. And while many others are trying it in different ways now with different hardware matched with AI, OpenAI has control of the most important element here: the AI! It's not as simple as "the hardware will sort itself out", of course. But given the team OpenAI has working on this...
Back to what I wrote in May:
You'll recall that Ive's last real dive into new product design at Apple was the Apple Watch. Their first true wearable, where they, yes, perhaps focused too much on the wearable part to start and less on what it should actually do.
Anyway, the IO device might be a bit like a newfangled tape recorder of sorts. Okay, I'm dating myself – a voice recorder. You know, the thing some journalists use to record subjects for interviews. Well, when they're not using their phones for that purpose, as they undoubtedly are 99% of the time these days. But it sounds sort of like that only with, I suspect, some sort of camera. I doubt that's about recording as much as it's about the ability to have ChatGPT "look" at something and tell you about it. But these are just guesses.
And they're sounding like increasingly good guesses. Even if the device is going to take longer to come to market than originally envisioned. Just imagine a world in which Jony Ive introduces OpenAI's first hardware – a small, screen-less digital companion for you life – at the same time that Apple unveils their next hardware – a pair of glasses with cameras on your face and perhaps a screen in your eye. One runs on ChatGPT. The other on Siri. That would be quite the dichotomy.
Update October 7, 2025: Ive and Altman did an interview around OpenAI's DevDay. While they didn't address the above report specificially, Altman did sort of acknowledge it, noting that "hardware is hard" and "it will take a while." Ive, meanwhile, said his team had come up with "15 to 20 really compelling" product ideas and that it has been a challenge to narrow them down. "It would be easy if we know there were three good ones," he said. The focus is in on devices that will "make us happy, and fulfilled, and more peaceful, and less anxious, and less disconnected."
M.G. Siegler
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