OpenAI and Jony Ive's AI Device: Ambitious Vision Meets Real-World Challenges

Siri suddenly has a whole lot of company in being terribly late

It turns out that doing something in AI that's genuinely better is very hard. As we all know, Apple is famously late to the AI party. So late, in fact, that it missed everyone doing keg stands and Kevin jumping off the roof into the pool. Also, the cops showing up. It's missed all the fun. Some who were at the party seem to be having less fun the day after, though. Take OpenAI and star designer Jony Ive, who are grappling with a series of technical issues with their secretive new artificial intelligence device, as they push to launch a blockbuster tech product next year. OpenAI: "Okay, yes, this is a pig, but just look at that $6.5 billion lipstick!" Despite having hardware developed by Ive and his team ... obstacles remain in the device's software and the infrastructure needed to power it. OpenAI: "We have this beautiful brick, now we just need to get it to do something." Really, how hard could that be? Someone send them a few more billion dollars. These include deciding on the assistant's "personality,"... Just tell it to turn down its sarcasm level. Easy peasy. "The concept is that you should have a friend who's a computer who isn't your weird AI girlfriend..." HEY, DON'T CALL THE MACALOPE'S CAT-EARED KAWAII ANIME AI WAIFU "WEIRD"! She hardly ever demands that he build her an indestructible android body anymore. At least while he's awake, anyway. Huh. Why is the Macalope holding this soldering iron and where did all these parts come from? ...privacy issues... Oh, there are privacy issues with AI? Seriously? You. Don't. Say. Very shocking, indeed, if true. It's almost as if these companies care more about rushing things to market than they do about privacy. And as if the tech press is tired of trying to evaluate privacy as a buying criterion because it's so serious and boring, and can't we just talk about the fun stuff? ... and budgeting... And here the Macalope thought AI was a perpetual motion machine of venture capital. If you run out of money, you just get acquired by the company that you acquired last year. Duh. C'mon, this is not that hard. Multiple people familiar with the plans said OpenAI and Ive were working on a device roughly the size of a smartphone that users would communicate with through a camera, microphone and speaker. One person suggested it might have multiple cameras. So, the only difference between it and a smartphone is it won't have a screen. Maybe the Macalope is wrong but this sounds like another swing at trying to make a device that weans humans off their screens. The negative effects of people being immersed in their screens all the time is something Ive has lamented of late, after making big bank at Apple getting people addicted to devices with screens on them. Well, if it is that, the Macalope says good luck to you. People seem to really like their smartphones and if your solution is a device that will talk to you instead... well, good luck with that. Also, saying screens are bad and then trying to substitute a technology that ignores copyright in order to generate questionable answers seems like a lateral move at best. One person said the device would be "always on"... Can we go back to those privacy issues again for a sec? OpenAI overtook Elon Musk's SpaceX to become the world's most valuable private company this week, after a deal that valued it at $500 billion. One of the ways the ChatGPT maker is seeking to justify the price tag is a push into hardware. Don't call it a bubble, though! "The concept is that you should have a friend who's a computer who isn't your weird AI girlfriend," said one source. Surely all these problems will get sorted in time for OpenAI to ship... something next year. Hey, totally unrelated, but remember the Humane pin? After the company's acquisition by HP for less than half the amount it had raised in capital, former CEO Imran Chaudhri now has the coveted job of... let's see here... touting the battery life of HP laptops in keynote videos. Apple may have missed shipping an enhanced Siri, and that is a legitimate issue the company needs to address sooner rather than later. But it's not the only one stumbling in the rush to ship AI products.

OpenAI device missing: Inventing the future's hard, even for Sam Altman-Jony Ive

Even visionaries must wrestle with hardware, privacy, and human limits In May 2025, Sam Altman and Jony Ive announced a partnership that would disrupt what personal computing devices meant in the age of AI. Beyond smartphones or laptops, they promised to bring to the fore screen-less devices that were highly ultraportable and equipped with cutting edge AI like ChatGPT available in voice mode. Ironman's JARVIS commoditised for the average Joe is how I like to imagine it right now. Not counting a "silly" lawsuit, as Altman called it at the time, from plaintiff Iyo who alleged "io" - the Jony Ive design startup acquired by OpenAI for $6.5 billion in May 2025 - stole its concepts for a screenless, AI-powered voice-controlled earbud-form factor devices, the dynamic duo of Altman and Ive are finding out just how hard it can be to reinvent the personal computing wheel, in a manner of speaking. Of course, no one said it was going to be easy, but when the whole world was led to believe that Sam Altman and his team at OpenAI had quietly started collaborating with Jony Ive and his company LoveForm for over two years on what both parties agreed and thought should be the first generation of native AI-embedded devices, surely I thought we would get to see some rudimentary concept of what it looked like before curtains fell on 2025. I mean, Sam Altman and Jony Ive were so excited to tell the world about what they were working on, I didn't think they'd make us all wait for more just to get a small glimpse of their fruits of labour. Wishful thinking, I know! Turns out, it isn't as easy as it looks, giving birth to a whole new class of devices that have never existed before. Given that it took the very first wireless telephone about 10 years to become from idea to concept, the first laptop give or take 3-4 years, and the iPhone about the same time, I thought creating new things would speed up a notch when we fast forward a couple of decades to the present. However, OpenAI DevDay 2025 has come and gone, but there are still quite a few technical challenges keeping whatever Sam Altman and Jony Ive are cooking well and truly in the oven for now. Also read: From GPT-5 Pro to Sora 2: Every major announcement from OpenAI DevDay 2025 Among those hurdles are some formidable ones. Delivering advanced AI computation on-device is one of the biggest - packing enough processing power, energy efficiency, and low-latency performance into a screenless, earbud-sized form factor remains an unsolved engineering problem. Then, of course, there's privacy. The idea of an always-on, always-listening device is as unnerving as it is futuristic, if you ask me. Ensuring conversations don't inadvertently escape the user's control will require privacy engineering that feels seriously difficult to pull off. User experience, too, is proving a beast. Without a screen, the device has to rely purely on context - your voice, tone, ambient sound, even random noises you make - to interpret intent. That's a tall order even for today's most sophisticated multimodal models. Balancing how much intelligence lives locally versus in the cloud is another minefield, because if you think about it cloud processing introduces lag and privacy risks, while on-device AI demands hardware that doesn't yet exist at scale. And perhaps most intriguingly, the team is said to be wrestling with how "personal" this assistant should feel - how proactive, how emotional, how much initiative it takes before crossing into uncanny valley territory. Also read: From Canva to Coursera: Why so many apps are rushing into ChatGPT's new app ecosystem While hardware is famously difficult to get right, these reported issues suggest that the ambitious project still has a difficult path ahead. More than Sam Altman, it would be wise to pay attention to what Jony Ive has to say about the AI hardware project he's working on closely with OpenAI - because unlike Altman, he actually does know a thing or two about designing and creating iconic tech products that have stood the test of time. Despite the challenges, Ive remained optimistic, stating in October 2025 that the devices could help people become "make us happy, less anxious and less disconnected." In the end, I suspect when Altman and Ive finally show us what they've been building, it won't look like anything we've held before. Maybe it'll whisper instead of shine, or disappear into the fabric of daily life, the way all great technology sometimes does. Until then, all we can do is wait - and pay attention to what's coming.