Beyond ChatGPT: OpenAI’s secret project
Altman is reportedly working on a revolutionary new project
At a time when OpenAI is losing liquidity and, as early as last autumn, the start-up itself had told investors that it would not generate profits before 2029, expecting to lose $44 billion before it could do so, this month’s news sees the start-up spending $6.5 billion to acquire another start-up, Jony Ive‘s Io.
According to Ive himself, the former Apple designer, the man who designed some of Steve Jobs‘ devices and his right-hand man, the aim of the acquisition of his start-up is to ‘create a family of products for the age of generative intelligence’. But what that would be, many are already wondering.
Io’s 55 employees, including engineers and researchers, will now become part of OpenAI directly, while Ive, while acquiring ‘creative and design responsibilities’, will not become an employee of OpenAI. In fact, according to Sam Altman, ‘we have an opportunity to reimagine what it means to use a computer’, thus creating a product ‘never before seen in consumer hardware’. Altman stated in the presentation video about the new project (from which the picture is taken) that the product will be something never seen before. The invention will probably be launched next year and will consist neither of a computer, nor of a telephone, nor of a television set, nor of glasses, but of something that could replace all these.
On the same day that the acquisition of Io was announced, Sam Altman a few hours later gave a preview to his staff of the devices they are developing to be built with Ive himself, outlining plans to create 100 million models, the ‘AI companions’, that will become part of everyone’s everyday life: ‘realising here the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company’. And Altman speculated that the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add a trillion dollars in value to OpenAI.
In the presentation video, Altman and Ive offered a few clues about the secret project: the product will be able to fully recognise its surroundings and the user’s life, it will be non-intrusive, but ‘discreet, it will fit in your pocket or on your desk, and it will be the third most important device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone’.
Ive spoke of ‘a new design movement’. Altman stated that it would be a ‘family of devices’, underlining his appreciation for the way Apple has long integrated its hardware and software offerings.
And yet, Altman’s futuristic AI Companions might remind us of two other similar, past and failed attempts: the first was conceived by two of Ive’s former designer colleagues who were also Apple employees, Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, who with the start-up Humane had come up with an alternative to smartphones, exploiting artificial intelligence to offer a more natural and less invasive interaction: the AI Pin. Despite initial enthusiasm and the support of investors such as Microsoft and OpenAI itself, the AI Pin received criticism for its disappointing performance, overheating problems and limited functionality. Sales have fallen short of expectations, with many units returned by users. And, last February, Humane was acquired by HP, which decided to discontinue production of the AI Pin and decommission existing devices.
The other project similar to Altman’s ambitious new secret project, which also failed, was the Rabbit R1, a pocket-sized device launched in 2024 by the start-up Rabbit. This device also aimed to replace the smartphone by offering a personal assistant based on artificial intelligence. However, it faced similar criticism regarding its limited functionality and lack of real added value compared to existing smartphones.
In the meantime, imagination can conjure up anything from another project as reckless as it is currently fallacious, such as Zuckerberg‘s Metaverse, to something epochal that could really consist of another industrial revolution. After all, until the advent of ChatGpt, no one would have ever imagined that classic browsers would be replaced by Altman’s platform: it is a fact now that most people no longer search on such engines, but directly on artificial intelligence platforms.
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