OpenAI president says it’s ‘building a family of devices’ for its AI chatbots
The Verge Stevie Bonifield
OpenAI's president confirms the company is building actual hardware, not just chatbots in a browser tab. No dates, no details, but Jony Ive's design fingerprints are apparently already on it.
Based on reporting by The Verge, Stevie Bonifield — read the original for the full story.
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Greg Brockman just did the thing tech executives love: confirm something everyone already suspected while revealing almost nothing useful about it. In a sit-down with Joanna Stern, OpenAI's president said the company is building a "family of devices" meant to be the physical way people talk to its AI models. Not a device. A family of them. That phrasing alone tells you this isn't a side project — it's a product line.
What Brockman wouldn't do is connect any dots. He didn't confirm the persistent rumor that OpenAI is aiming for a smart speaker sometime around 2027. He didn't confirm or deny the earlier chatter that one of these gadgets might resemble the Humane AI Pin, the wearable that became a cautionary tale rather than a category-definer. His only real commitment was temporal mush: "you can expect them soon." Soon is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
The more interesting subplot is legal, not technical. Apple is suing OpenAI, and the suit touches on the involvement of Jony Ive, the man who shaped every iPhone that mattered before he left Apple to build things elsewhere. Ive's design studio is reportedly working with OpenAI on hardware, which is exactly the kind of collaboration that makes Apple's lawyers twitchy. Asked directly whether that lawsuit could complicate OpenAI's hardware ambitions, Brockman pivoted into corporate-speak about staying focused, the verbal equivalent of putting a hand up to block a camera.
Strip away the non-answers and what's left is a company betting that chatbots trapped inside phone apps and browser windows are a transitional form, not the endpoint. Amazon proved people will talk to a speaker. Humane proved people won't necessarily wear a badge that talks back. OpenAI apparently thinks there's a version of physical AI that threads that needle, and it's willing to risk a fight with Apple's legal team to find out what that looks like.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
Every AI lab eventually decides it needs to be a hardware company too, and almost none of them should be. OpenAI hasn't shipped a single device yet and it's already talking about a 'family' of them, which is the kind of language that precedes expensive flops more often than it precedes iPhones. I'll believe this matters when I can hold one, not when a president says 'soon' on a podcast.
Read more about this at: The Verge