Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s mysterious AI gadget hits a speed bump

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Remember last year’s whispers about Jony Ive, Apple’s ex-design wizard, teaming up with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to create the so-called “iPhone of artificial intelligence”? 

Well, that dream device, reportedly a sleek, screenless, pocket-sized AI companion, might be running a bit late to the future.

Earlier this year, OpenAI officially acquired Ive’s startup io in a $6.5 billion deal, confirming the secretive partnership that had been buzzing since 2023. 

Altman hyped the gadget in May as “the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen,” which is quite the statement coming from the guy whose software occasionally hallucinates.

But according to a new report from the Financial Times, the ambitious project is now facing delays thanks to, you guessed it, “technical challenges.” 

The mysterious device, described as “roughly the size of a smartphone but without a screen,” will apparently use cameras and microphones to sense your environment and respond to voice prompts. 

Think of it as a mix between Alexa, HAL 9000, and your friend who never looks up from their AirPods.

So what’s holding it up? Well, quite a lot. Sources say the team hasn’t nailed down the AI assistant’s personality (somewhere between helpful and not creepy, ideally), nor solved the massive computing power problem. 

OpenAI is already struggling to keep ChatGPT running smoothly, so building an always-on hardware device powered by similar models is proving tricky. 

“Amazon has the compute for Alexa. Google has it for Home,” one insider told the FT. “OpenAI doesn’t, yet.”

The team also doesn’t want a repeat of the Humane AI Pin, last year’s overhyped wearable that promised to replace smartphones but instead replaced optimism with disappointment.

It flopped due to bad design, laggy AI, and a $699 price tag that screamed “beta test.” 

So for now, the Ive–Altman wonder device remains under wraps.

Is a screenless AI gadget the future of personal tech, or just another overhyped hardware experiment destined to flop like the Humane AI Pin? Can OpenAI and Jony Ive actually deliver on the promise of an “iPhone of AI,” or are technical and infrastructure challenges too big to overcome? Drop us a line below in the comments, or carry the discussion to our Twitter or Facebook.