Jony Ive and Sam Altman say they finally have an AI hardware prototype (www.theverge.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and famed designer Jony Ive revealed at Emerson Collective’s 2025 Demo Day that they have settled on a prototype for OpenAI’s first piece of hardware and expect it could ship in “less than” two years. Both emphasized a design ethos — “simple and beautiful and playful” — aimed at making the device tactile and approachable; Altman said an earlier prototype didn’t evoke the urge to pick it up, but the current version does. Beyond aesthetic notes, specifics remain tightly guarded. For the AI/ML community this matters because it signals OpenAI moving from model-first software to productized, physical interfaces where form factor, latency, privacy and on-device inference become central engineering problems. Even without technical specs, the effort implies work on system-level challenges: efficient model serving or hardware acceleration, power and thermal trade-offs, sensor and input design, and secure data flows between cloud and device. If successful, such a product could reshape expectations for human–AI interaction, push competition on AI hardware and UX, and create new constraints and opportunities for model optimization and deployment pipelines.