Sam Altman and Jony Ive have a 'lick' test for OpenAI's mysterious AI device, which they expect within the next 2 years (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and designer Jony Ive revealed new — if deliberately vague — details about a consumer AI device they’re building together, saying it should arrive in “even less than” two years. The pair described an iterative design process that culminated in a prototype that passed Ive’s tongue-in-cheek “lick” test — a shorthand for an object so beautifully resolved you’d instinctively want to hold (or even bite) it. OpenAI bought Ive’s hardware startup IO for roughly $6.5 billion and says this work is part of a broader “family of AI products.” Altman emphasized the goal: a product that feels “vastly different” from current devices, strips away clutter and notifications, and provokes an immediate “That’s it” reaction. For the AI/ML community the announcement signals a major push toward integrated AI-native hardware and UX-driven model deployment. While technical specifics (models, on-device vs. cloud inference, sensors, privacy design) remain undisclosed, the collaboration highlights priorities: tight hardware–software co-design, extreme simplification of interactions, and product-level constraints that will shape latency, power, and privacy trade-offs. If successful, this effort could set new expectations for how generative and assistant-style AI are embedded in consumer hardware, influence benchmarks for responsiveness and energy efficiency, and intensify competition between platform makers shaping AI’s everyday user experience.