from Hacker News

What Sam Altman told OpenAI about the device he's making with Jony Ive

by MrJagil on 5/22/25, 2:03 PM with 84 comments

  • by MrJagil on 5/22/25, 2:03 PM

  • by beau_g on 5/22/25, 4:37 PM

    Being a designer myself, but in the interest of public good, I will share my design here and urge anyone else to copy it. The ideal form factor for this device is a cowboy hat. Here's why

    1. Such a device will require significant local compute, generating a lot of heat. It cannot be too close to the body, and require efficient cooling. In the cowboy hat, the processing can be placed above the head in the bucket of the hat, and the cooling dispersed in a large surface area around the brim

    2. Such a device requires 360 degree camera vision, thus cannot be a backpack or vest type design (which also bring heat too close to the body). It also must be close to eye level (cannot be shoes).

    3. Has to be able to be worn in any environment, with any style. A cowboy hat is great for sun protection, and in the rain.

  • by duxup on 5/22/25, 2:07 PM

    >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, and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

    We're all comfortable with phones with all sorts of sensors, but most of those are on or off in a way we understand.

    I'm not a fan of the idea that someone else around me brings a device that is perpetually "fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life" around me and then now my privacy is gone ...

  • by seydor on 5/22/25, 4:32 PM

    I would bet it will be called "The Dramamaker"

    > 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,

    Sounds an awful lot like the phone. But it s not a phone. But people forget that a tool with the form factor of a phone has been man's best friend for millenia: it was a knife, a purse, a notebook, and now a phone. They are not going to beat that , is my bet. If it can be integrated in a phone, it's a phone

    > a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

    That's my car keys. now i will have to charge them too?

  • by whywhywhywhy on 5/22/25, 4:28 PM

    >stealth will be important for their ultimate success to avoid competitors copying the product before it’s ready.

    shouldn't statements like this be bearish for OpenAI? If what they had internally was so far ahead of everyone else then why would it matter if the physical hardware were cloned, the model would make the difference in the same way the iPhone software and focus on scroll fidelity made it leagues above the LG Prada.

  • by wnevets on 5/22/25, 4:43 PM

    > He suggested the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

    Crazy part is there will be investors who will absolutely believe this. Nothing has shattered the illusion the rich are smarter than everyone else for me than the sagas of madoff, ftx, holmes and now the AI hype.

  • by baxtr on 5/22/25, 4:54 PM

    I must say I lost a lot of respect for Jony Ive in the last couple of days.

  • by neilv on 5/22/25, 6:24 PM

    > and would be a third core device a person would put on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.

    Or build an AI-enabled device that replaces both. All you really need is local sensors, local emitters, and lots of local+remote processing+storage.

    The laptop/desktop mostly goes away, when most people won't need desks, since most desk-requiring jobs will soon be done passably by "AI". (Whether the "AI" is actual intelligence, or just robo-plagiarism of training material.) Do you really need a keyboard, when there's nothing for you to type. Do you really need a bunch of screens, when you're not looking at and reasoning about lots of information.

    If anyone is going to build a one-device for the idle and disaffected eloi, to be harvested of remaining value, by the weathly, who increasingly consolidate all of the wealth and power, it may well be OpenAI building that device.

    Apple isn't the best candidate to nail this, because they have lingering whiffs of hippie counterculture in their self-image. And for a long time, Google thought of themselves as the good ones, with vestiges of that enduring, no matter how much DoubleClick metastasizes. But OpenAI staff was confronted unambiguously with its true self early on, so doesn't have the encumbrances that the others do.

  • by micromacrofoot on 5/22/25, 4:46 PM

    It's not rocket science, these people aren't even all that clever. It's going to be some kind of camera (maybe lidar) and microphone, there's nothing else it can be — you need to put something into AI to get something out of it.

    It'll probably be some goofy 180/360 degree camera — phones aren't really designed to be omnipresent so the form factor isn't ideal for the always-on nature of AI they're trying to reach.

  • by sigmaisaletter on 5/22/25, 5:20 PM

    * The first generation were those silly AI pins last year.

    * The second generation will be this opaqueAI ivePad.

    * And when the third generation comes out, all phones will already have whatever makes this special.

    I don't think Sama and Ive are smarter than everyone else, but even if they are, I don't see how this flies.

  • by HarHarVeryFunny on 5/22/25, 4:53 PM

    People already carry around a smartphone plenty capable of accessing AI, whether in the cloud or increasingly local. Smartphones, with screens, are not going away because people have plenty of uses for screens from photos to videos to texting, etc.

    The WSJ article says this proposed device can either sit on your desk or go in your pocket, so it's basically either an Alexa in-home device or a bigger pocket-bound Humana pin, or some worse-than-either fits-in-your-pocket compromise.

    Not sure what Altman was thinking in paying $6B for an idea that seems bound to fail, unless it is indeed part of a plan to help him cash in on OpenAI, even if that means throwing $6B of stock away.

  • by deepfriedchokes on 5/22/25, 7:20 PM

    Altman is trying to do an end run around Google/Apple/Microsoft. They’ve got search, now they’re adding hardware, next they’ll extend their interface to replace the traditional OS with an AI agent. Altman probably has a social strategy as well.

    I think they’ll fail because they’re discounting how much energy it takes for people to change ecosystems, but it’s a great idea that the big boys will copy.

  • by fellowniusmonk on 5/22/25, 4:31 PM

    It's honestly only because apple and google have so locked down their devices that we can't use them as little digital motherships for all of our peripherals.

    the whole pattern of usage for the slab phone medium is based on sucking up as much of our attention as possible.

    That and doing anything with bluetooth makes one long for a simple life in the woods.

  • by DebtDeflation on 5/22/25, 4:34 PM

    So basically an Alexa/Echo except with always-on microphone and camera communicating with OpenAI's servers?

  • by ethbr1 on 5/23/25, 12:36 AM

    > [Altman] suggested the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

    So the plan is to mine personal data from every user and sell it, then?

  • by amelius on 5/22/25, 4:24 PM

    Can't he just ask one of his diffusion models to come up with a design?

  • by jsheard on 5/22/25, 4:48 PM

    > He suggested the $6.5 billion acquisition has the potential to add $1 trillion in value to OpenAI, according to a recording reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

    Not sure if he's high on his own supply or just lying through his teeth, but it's one of those. You're going to get value comparable to owning half of Google from acquiring a small hardware design team? Really?

  • by Isamu on 5/22/25, 4:41 PM

    I’m not looking for this product but my daughter could use something that identifies and reads everything in the environment that she can just query

  • by einrealist on 5/22/25, 4:58 PM

    Can the device work offline or does it need constant connection to a data center? Already sounds like a security and privacy nightmare.

  • by eabeezxjc on 5/22/25, 4:56 PM

    AI today use text. Human prefer image or(and) sound. Therefore assistent must be a big screen, ocular or .... implant

  • by matthewfelgate on 5/23/25, 9:05 AM

    I struggle to see what any new device could deliver that a smartphone can't.

  • by hbarka on 5/22/25, 4:40 PM

    If Plaud.ai is a Nokia phone, I hope what they’re building is like iPhone-level of change.

    Will we have another moment like this: https://youtu.be/MnrJzXM7a6o

  • by neilv on 5/22/25, 7:56 PM

    > 24 points by MrJagil 5 hours ago [...] 73 comments

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