Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg: OpenAI’s much-anticipated push into consumer devices is slated to begin with a mobile, screen-free smart speaker designed to be a new type of home computer for the AI era, according to people familiar with the matter.
The product — still under development — is meant to serve as a humanlike AI companion that lives in the home, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the project hasn’t been announced. It will help control smart-home appliances, play media, answer questions, respond to messages and tap into the range of capabilities offered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, they said.
Though the new product resembles a speaker, OpenAI internally describes it as the first of its kind: a computer built for AI to help make busy people more productive. It includes a camera and other sensors that help it understand a user’s surroundings and context, as well as advanced AI models beyond those available on conventional smart speakers.
Remember Jibo? Jibo, developed by a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology after a successful Kickstarter campaign, was an animated voice robot that would move around with a motorized base and use its camera to detect facial expressions and gestures. Jibo came years before the modern large language model, and its use was limited, but I’d imagine this device from OpenAI to be much like it. Like Jibo, this is just not a breakthrough consumer product. It’s a Bluetooth smart speaker with a motorized base — which Gurman describes as “mechanical elements that can move on their own” — and ChatGPT built in.
You can already buy a smart speaker with an LLM for just $100: it’s the Google Home Speaker, and — news flash — it’s not a revolutionary product. It’s certainly not revolutionary enough to warrant buying Jony Ive’s hardware company and poaching trade secrets from Apple. But none of this even considers how unfeasible it will be to have a hardware product from OpenAI — a company almost universally taken with distrust — listening and peering into people’s homes all day long. I’d be hard-pressed to find a single person who wants that. There are people on the streets irate about OpenAI data centers being built in their backyards; on what planet will those people put an OpenAI product in their homes?
OpenAI has spent billions of dollars on this hardware venture. It has upended the technology industry — it has decimated entry-level jobs, transformed computer science education, and sowed doubt in tech as a whole. People are down on artificial intelligence and technology writ large. For this product — and OpenAI as a company — to be successful, it must transform not only its public image, but that of the technology it wants to sell. I have a hard time believing a Bluetooth smart speaker designed by Ive with ChatGPT built in is a serious solution to that problem. Maybe it’s the most beautiful speaker in the world. Maybe it’s made with gold or some opulent frills. That doesn’t change the fact that OpenAI has a gargantuan favorability problem.
OpenAI also has a money problem. People do not like paying for AI. Only a small fraction of ChatGPT users are paying subscribers, and most of those people are on the lowest subscription tiers. The people who do pay heavily for AI burn subsidized tokens so hard that Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, is holding back on an initial public offering until the company’s finances are more stable. What company that is struggling to sell consumers on a $20 subscription and enterprises at base rates for its models could possibly think it could sell hardware? The one popular product OpenAI makes, ChatGPT, is not profitable. It can’t even persuade people to pay for its flagship innovation, let alone a designer smart speaker.
I really don’t want to be Steve Ballmer. “$500? Fully subsidized? With a plan?” But I have a feeling this take will fare much better than my take from last year. Over a year later, Apple doesn’t look bad anymore; OpenAI does.