OpenAI Building AI Smart Devices
OpenAI has reportedly deployed over 200 employees to build a family of AI-powered smart devices, signaling a major push into hardware. The initial product lineup is said to include a $300 smart speaker equipped with a built-in camera. The move suggests a strategy to create an ecosystem where its AI models can power multimodal, agentic, and deeply personalized user experiences beyond the desktop.
- The hardware initiative is a collaboration with former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, whose startup 'io' was acquired by OpenAI for a reported $6.5 billion to form the new hardware division. - OpenAI has aggressively recruited talent from Apple, hiring more than 40 engineers in the past year, including former top executives like Tang Tan to lead hardware engineering and Evans Hankey to head industrial design. - The smart speaker is expected to be the first device launched, with a target release of early 2027 at the earliest and a projected price between $200 and $300. - A key feature of the speaker will be its ability to use its camera for environmental perception and to identify users with a facial recognition feature similar to Apple's Face ID, which can be used to authorize purchases. - The push into hardware follows the widely criticized launches of other standalone AI gadgets like the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit R1, which struggled to find a market and prove their utility over existing smartphones. - Beyond the initial speaker, OpenAI is also exploring a smart lamp and smart glasses, though mass production of the glasses is not anticipated until 2028 or later. - This hardware effort runs parallel to CEO Sam Altman's separate fundraising attempts for a new venture, codenamed Tigris, aimed at developing low-cost AI chips to compete with Nvidia. - In a November 2025 presentation, Sam Altman described a prototype of the new hardware as "the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen," emphasizing a design that would be simple, beautiful, and playful.
