According to an anonymously sourced report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, the much hyped and frequently mocked physical doohickey coming soon from OpenAI will be… a smart speaker that moves.
In April, another major source of Apple rumors, Ming-Chi Kuo, analyst at TF International Securities described something in a different category when he said OpenAI was releasing an “AI agent phone.” One (or both) of these rumors could be wrong, or this could be a different device, or—and in my view this is equally likely—the thing OpenAI is making could split the difference between being a phone and being a smart speaker.
After all, what’s in the Bloomberg article doesn’t sound entirely stale and uncreative. It will apparently be portable, battery-powered, and small enough to be easy to move from one room to another—like a baby monitor or 90s cordless phone perhaps. But it will also be capable of controlling the smart appliances in your house, screenless, and chatbot-powered, like a smart speaker.
And then there’s this curveball: it will reportedly have mechanical components that allow it to move in some way or another, giving the impression that it is “alive.”
If that part about moving sounds harebrained to you, what if I said it sounds oddly like something Apple has been working on for the past few years? There are reportedly three prototype home devices that have been floating around Cupertino for a while: two Siri-powered smart speakers, meant to introduce a new and more sophisticated Apple HomePod ecosystem, along with a third *that is also a little robot that moves around your tabletop. *
Last week, Apple sued OpenAI for misappropriating its trade secrets, alleging a scheme involving the poaching of talent from Apple, including mechanical engineer Tang Tan. OpenAI says in response, “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” according to spokesperson Drew Pusateri, who adds, “We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.”
But it’s worth keeping in mind that other rumors about the Apple home robot device have made it seem like more of an iPad-like device with robotic swiveling action, and not at all like a smart speaker.
The smart speaker device is apparently the culmination of OpenAI’s relationship with former Apple design legend Jony Ive, and the $6.4 billion acquisition of Ive’s hardware design company io.
As far as what might make the OpenAI device at least ostensibly special and unique, Bloomberg’s source claims that it’s supposed to be a companion that gets “increasingly personalized and proactive as it gains a deeper understanding of its owner over time.”
It needs to live up to every part of that claim and more, because it would not be an exaggeration to say it is the most hyperbolically hyped-up device since the Segway scooter in 2001.
Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have sounded downright creepily obsessed with this thing since the slickly produced video announcement of their friendship (What, you don’t do this when you make a friend?) released in March of last year.
In November, Altman recounted Ive saying “‘We’ll know we’ll have the design right when you want to lick it or take a bite out of it.’” Altman then claimed that “There was an earlier prototype that we were like quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of like ‘I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out of it.” He then added, “But finally we got there all of a sudden.”
Altman has also said the device will be “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” And Bloomberg says it will be a smart speaker, so I guess we’ll soon see who’s right.