Sam Altman Tells Staff Plan to Ship 100 Million Devices That See Everything in Users’ Lives
byNoor Al-Sibai
May 22, 3:14 PM EDT
Chip Somodevilla / Getty / Futurism
Have we learned nothing from “Black Mirror”?
Marriage of Minds
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is teaming up with a famous Apple designer to make wearables that can see your whole life — and he’s instructed his staff to ship 100 million of them.
As the Wall Street Journal reports, Altman recently told employees they’ll soon be manufacturing the secretive new “AI companion” device with Jony Ive, the beknighted designer behind the iPhone.
News of the device comes just after OpenAI revealed that it had purchased Ive’s AI company, io, and had been “quietly” collaborating for a few years with his creative collective, LoveFrom. Notably, the company’s purchase announcement didn’t include its pricetag, but Altman and Ive told Bloomberg that it would be worth nearly $6.5 billion.
In a recording of the call announcing the purchase that was leaked to the WSJ, Altman told employees that the io acquisition will offer everyone involved a “chance to do the biggest thing we’ve ever done as a company.”
He and Ives then added that the device, which is still in stealth and has not been named, will be unobtrusive, capable of fitting inside a pocket or on a desk, and will be “fully aware” of a user’s surroundings and life.
The device, as Ives and Altman told OpenAI staff, will not have phone capabilities like an Apple Watch, and according to Ives and Altman, it’s intended to help wean its users from their screens.
History Repeating
Though the collab between these tech heavyweights may seem like a match made in Silicon Valley heaven, it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to wear, or even place on their desk, an AI-enabled device that knows everything they’re doing — especially in the aftermath of the Humane AI pin disaster, which users returned en masse because they hated the bulky $700 wearable so bad. (Notably, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested that the OpenAI-Ive collab device may be “slightly larger” than Humane’s bulky offering, which is roughly the size of an Apple Watch face.)
It remains unclear whether the device’s “awareness” will include recordings, and if so, where such private data will be stored, and we’ve reached out to OpenAI to ask about those specifics.
Regardless of what’s going on behind the scenes, however, the whole thing premise is creepily reminiscent of “The Entire History Of You,” the infamous “Black Mirror” episode about a near-future ocular implant that records everything a person sees. Apparently, we haven’t learned a thing in the 13 years since that episode first aired on British TV.
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