OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on a quest to build an AI-first device that he says will be as revolutionary as the iPhone but will bring users peace and calm instead of more stress. He even got Jony Ive, the designer of the original iPhone, to help build it.
In an onstage interview with Ive at Emerson Collective’s Demo Day this week, Altman confirmed the AI device, which was first teased in May after OpenAI acquired Ive’s startup, io, will be released in less than two years. Yet the first prototypes are ready, he added, and they may look nothing like what we’re used to.
The yet-unnamed device will be a sort of anti-iPhone. It’s unclear what the design of this device will actually entail—if it will have a screen like a smartphone, or go the route of the always-listening AI Friend necklace, although Altman said the people who have seen it were surprised by its simplicity.
One thing’s for sure: The new device is meant to get away from the mind-numbing distractions we associate with modern technology.
“When I use current devices or most applications, I feel like I am walking through Times Square in New York and constantly just dealing with all the little indignities along the way, flashing lights in my face…it’s an unsettling thing,” Altman told Emerson Collective founder and Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs.
This hectic experience, which Altman says is what has gone wrong with technology, stands in contrast to how the new OpenAI device will feel like. Instead of adding stress, the 40-year-old CEO said, using the device feels like “sitting in the most beautiful cabin by a lake and in the mountains and sort of just enjoying the peace and calm.”
Much like the Friend necklace, the new OpenAI device and others to come after, which Altman teased, will capture context from your life and help it know when it should filter things out, and when to ask for your input.
“You trust it over time, and it does have just this incredible contextual awareness of your whole life,” Altman said.
OpenAI is banking on Ive, Apple’s former design chief, to replicate the success he had in helping design some of Apple’s most iconic products such as the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. For the new device, he may follow the same simplicity and intuitiveness that has defined Apple devices for decades.
“I love solutions that teeter on appearing almost naive in their simplicity,” Ive said at the Emerson Collective Demo Day this week.