Leak reveals what Sam Altman and Jony Ive are cooking up: 100 million AI companion devices

And they’re not XR glasses.

Cecily Mauran

Tech Reporter

Cecily is a tech reporter at Mashable who covers AI, Apple, and emerging tech trends. Before getting her master’s degree at Columbia Journalism School, she spent several years working with startups and social impact businesses for Unreasonable Group and B Lab. Before that, she co-founded a startup consulting business for emerging entrepreneurial hubs in South America, Europe, and Asia. You can find her on X at @cecily_mauran.

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on May 22, 2025

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Former Apple designer Jony Ive (here at a 2017 event) has a grand vision for AI devices.

Credit: Brian Ach / Getty Images for The New Yorker / Getty Images

OpenAI and Jony Ive’s vision for its AI device is a screenless companion that knows everything about you.

Details leaked to the Wall Street Journal give us a clearer picture of OpenAI’s acquisition of io, cofounded by Ive, the iconic iPhone designer. The ChatGPT maker reportedly plans to ship 100 million AI devices designed to fit in with users’ everyday life.

“The product will be capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk,” according to a recording of an OpenAI staff meeting reviewed by the Journal. The device “will be a third core device a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone,” per the meeting which occurred the same day (Wednesday) that OpenAI announced its acquisition of Ive’s company.

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The device will attempt to “wean users from screens” and be a more seamless interaction with users that doesn’t involve pulling up a phone or opening up a laptop. “The products that we’re using to deliver and connect us to unimaginable technology, they’re decades old,” said Ive in a video introducing yesterday’s announcement. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Ive are hoping to introduce an entirely new device that removes those barriers. If that sounds familiar, recall Altman’s controversial obsession with Scarlett Johansson’s AI companion in Spike Jonze’s sci-fi film Her.

In the film, the AI device sits in Joaquin Phoenix’s character’s shirt pocket and sees and hears what he does. Similarly, OpenAI is reportedly going this route instead of developing XR glasses like Google and Meta.

OpenAI and Ive will not be the first to attempt to create such a device. The Humane Ai pin, which Altman invested in, recently tried to disrupt the entire smartphone paradigm and flopped spectacularly. It was led by former Apple executives, but they weren’t Jony Ive and Humane didn’t have OpenAI’s level of investment and influence. That said, it was also just riddled with bugs and inaccurate responses. Even though OpenAI’s models still have major hallucination problems, they’re still some of the most capable on the market. In this regard, maybe OpenAI will have a better shot.

Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

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