OpenAI is racing headlong into becoming a hardware company, led by former Apple employees Jony Ive, Evans Hanke, Tang Tan, and others. Despite the Apple pedigree, the OpenAI hardware team appears to be operating much more like a Silicon Valley software or AI company by moving fast and trying a lot of different things.

A new report from The Information expanded the number of devices that OpenAI is prototyping. In fact, the report mentioned three new devices that I haven't seen reported anywhere else.

The list of reported devices from OpenAI now includes:

• Smart glasses: These would presumably be similar to Meta Ray-Bans and forthcoming products from Google, Samsung, and Apple, but won't arrive until 2028. This was the most surprising of the three newly reported devices since Sam Altman had previously stated that the special device OpenAI was working on with Jony Ive was not a pair of glasses.
• Smart speaker: This is another of the newly reported devices and would compete with market-leading Amazon Echo speakers, which have been quite popular but are very limited in capabilities and are facing a five-year decline in sales.
• Smart lamp: The last of the three newly reported devices, this would presumably be a smart speaker built into a lamp. Perhaps it might also tie into the recently announced ChatGPT Health and track your sleep.
• Smart earbud: More recently, reports have centered on OpenAI's Jony Ive device morphing into a smart earbud (or earbuds). The Foxconn supply chain leak on this one quoted a release date for this September. It still feels like the most useful and the most imminent.
• Smart pin: This smart pin sounds quite like the poorly received Humane AI pin. I suspect that OpenAI may have pivoted away from this device to the earbud mentioned above. However, Apple has also reportedly been working on an AI pin, so OpenAI might still be considering the form factor as well.
• Smart pen: Not to be left out, OpenAI has also reportedly been working on an AI smart pen. Like the earbud, this device has been tied to supply chain leaks connected to Foxconn. This one would presumably feed your handwritten notes in ChatGPT to add to voice and typed inputs. We can also imagine this device could have a microphone and/or camera to make it multimodal.

The biggest thing these OpenAI devices would have going for them — as much as the device aesthetics from the former Apple aficionados — is ChatGPT Voice (formerly Voice Mode). This feature isn't often discussed, but it's far more capable and usable than Siri or Alexa. I'd even give it a slight edge over Google's Ask Gemini (formerly Google Assistant), which is the only voice mode currently in its league.

Our Deeper View

Of all six of these reported devices, I still consider the AI smart earbud the most promising in the short term. It would likely be moderate in price, it's a form factor most people already use, and even just having ChatGPT Voice at the ready would be a win. When we polled The Deep View audience earlier this year about buying an AI device from OpenAI, 43% said they would. So the brand still has work to do in winning over consumers. Also keep in mind that companies regularly leak reports like this to the press as trial balloons to gauge which devices draw the most buzz from consumers before deciding whether to actually manufacture them. So I predict we will not see all six of these devices come to market.