AI gadgets are back, baby! Or that’s what Jony Ive and Sam Altman hope. Well, they may not really hope they’re back as much as they hope they’re not completely and utterly cooked. ICYMI, Ive and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, announced in a post-Google I/O keynote bombshell that they are teaming up under a new company called, “io” to make, um… something? Whatever it is, it’s apparently worth $6.5 billion of OpenAI’s cold, hard AI revolution money.
We truly, genuinely, do not know what the two are making together outside of the fact that it’s going to be a piece of hardware (or potentially many), and it will be centered on AI (duh). But just because we can’t answer the burning question of what this thing is yet doesn’t mean we don’t have some clues. For your speculative pleasure, I’ve gone ahead and aggregated the best hints we have so far, Pepe Silvia-style, to bring us at least one baby step closer to hazarding a guess. Here are the tastiest “phone-killing” AI gadget rumors we have so far.
Lots of the best hints about what we can expect come from a Wall Street Journal report published on Wednesday. According to the report, Altman gave the OpenAI staff a preview of devices in the pipeline and offered a little insight into what they may be like.
Two key elements, according to the WSJ report, are that the gadget will be “fully aware” of a user’s “surroundings and life.” That obviously doesn’t offer a ton in terms of what shape the form factor will take, but it does point toward the ultimate product having sensors—a camera, microphone, maybe some sort of computer vision? Again, it’s hard to say, but to be “aware,” the AI device is going to need some of that stuff. And that’s not just me guessing on that front…
Another detail from WSJ is that the gadget will be “unobtrusive,” which could refer, at least in part, to Ive’s trademark minimalist aesthetic, but likely hints at a more key aspect of its design—no screen. The screenless aspect seems to be corroborated by an inside scoop from Ming-Chi Kuo, a longtime technology analyst and credible tech rumor source. In a post on X, Kuo writes, “It will have cameras and microphones for environmental detection, with no display functionality.”
That’s not surprising given that Ive has gone on record previously talking about how he doesn’t exactly love what the iPhone has become since he helped pioneer it with Steve Jobs back in the day. Whether a screenless AI device can actually succeed where others like Humane’s Ai Pin failed is a big question, but Ive and Altman seem to be willing to give the idea another go.
My industry research indicates the following regarding the new AI hardware device from Jony Ive’s collaboration with OpenAI:
1. Mass production is expected to start in 2027.
2. Assembly and shipping will occur outside China to reduce geopolitical risks, with Vietnam currently the… pic.twitter.com/5IELYEjNyV— 郭明錤 (Ming-Chi Kuo) (@mingchikuo) May 22, 2025
One of the strangest details that hit me while sorting through the drip is how Altman is referring to the duo’s hardware. According to WSJ, Altman referred to the device as a “companion.” That could really mean anything, but to me, when I see “companion,” my mind gravitates less to a wearable and more to… a robot? I’m not the only one looking in that direction, either. Altman has at least given some indication in the past that he wants to make a “really cute” computer, and this would seem to be a perfect opportunity to do just that.
I hear what Jony Ive and Sam Altman are building is a small robot. A really cute one.@kscalelabs has a really cute one, a little dude about a foot high.
I already gave the founders my credit card so I could be first to get it. $1,000. https://t.co/qeVjSl6VLo
— Robert Scoble (@Scobleizer) May 21, 2025
Another interesting bit from Kuo’s “industry research” is that the device may ultimately not compute entirely on its own. Kuo writes that “it is expected to connect to smartphones and PCs, utilizing their computing and display capabilities.” If you ask me, that’s a bit of a cop-out in terms of being screenless and nowhere near as quirky as the Humane AI Pin’s projection interface, but probably a smart idea in the long term for making something that’s, uh, functional. There’s a lot we can guess at with this nugget, but my brain skates to some kind of agentic AI—think a connective “companion” that you carry around to do computer stuff for you. A thing that connects to the thing to make things less annoying! Sounds convoluted but potentially useful?
One of the most confusing bits of messaging is on the wearable front. Making an AI wearable has proved difficult, if the Ai Pin is any indication, but according to Kuo, there could be a wearable aspect to it. “One of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck,” writes Kuo. That seems to contradict some of the initial rumblings from the WSJ, however. According to the WSJ, the device will be “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.”
Pocket and desk? That doesn’t really sound wearable-esque to me, but I guess the answer could be somewhere in between. There are already some AI devices out there—like this AI pendant—that are intended to be worn around your neck, so the idea wouldn’t be totally novel, but something tells me Ive and Altman are looking to iterate on existing form factors for AI gadgets. And wearables? So passé.
