It was in October 2023 that reports first surfaced of Apple’s former design guru, Jony Ive, teaming up with OpenAI chief Sam Altman to create what was dubbed at the time as “the iPhone of artificial intelligence.”
Earlier this year, OpenAI said it was acquiring io, a startup co-founded by Ive, in a $6.5 billion deal that finally confirmed the existence of the partnership to develop new AI-powered hardware.
In May, Altman said he’d already seen Ive’s design for the product, describing it as “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
But the device is still hidden away.
A target launch date has been set for next year, but a report by the Financial Times (FT) over the weekend suggested that it faces a delay as the team attempts to overcome a number of technical issues.
The much-anticipated product will be “a palm-sized device without a screen that can take audio and visual cues from the physical environment and respond to users’ requests,” according to the FT, which has spoken to people with knowledge of the project. It’s also been described by an insider as “roughly the size of a smartphone that users would communicate with through a camera, microphone, and speaker.”
But the report added that the team is having issues with the device’s “software and the infrastructure needed to power it.”
For example, It’s currently trying to agree on the personality of the device’s AI assistant, while also addressing privacy issues.
A source told the FT that “compute is another huge factor for the delay,” referring to the computing power and infrastructure necessary to run the advanced AI models that the device will depend on. “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.”
It wouldn’t be unusual for an all-new device to face delays, and no doubt Ive and Altman have at the forefront of their minds the disastrous launch suffered by Humane’s AI Pin.
The AI Pin was a highly anticipated AI-powered wearable device released in April 2024. It was marketed as a revolutionary smartphone replacement but failed spectacularly due to a slew of issues that included poor product design, slow and unreliable AI responses, short battery life, and a high price of $699 plus additional subscription costs.
The device was discontinued in February this year and the company sold its key assets to HP for $116 million.
