OpenAI says it’s building a ‘family of devices’ for AI

OpenAI president Greg Brockman said the company is building a "family of devices" for interacting with its AI models and that people should "expect them soon," while also pushing back on Apple's ↘ 0.56% trade-secrets lawsuit and acknowledging the ChatGPT desktop app's confusing redesign, in an interview published Tuesday on journalist Joanna Stern's YouTube channel.9to5mac+1

Hardware Ambitions

Brockman declined to confirm reports that one of OpenAI's devices is a smart speaker rumored for a 2027 launch, or to give a specific release date. But he said the company is also building its own chips and aims to deliver devices "built for the AI era" that offer "value over time." Rumors have pointed to a screenless mobile smart speaker described as a "humanlike AI companion" for home use, developed with former Apple designer Jony Ive.macrumors+1

When Brockman asked ChatGPT what OpenAI's first device might look like, it responded: "Something ambient and low friction, voice first but not voice only and with a clear privacy signal." Brockman also predicted that voice interaction will become the dominant mode of computing for "the vast majority of what we do."theverge+1

Apple Lawsuit and Desktop App

Responding to Apple's lawsuit accusing OpenAI of stealing confidential information from Apple employees during job interviews, Brockman said: "We have no interest in other companies' trade secrets. We are plenty innovative. We are thinking about things from our own angle." He called it "active litigation" and declined to elaborate further.macrumors+1

On the recently merged ChatGPT and Codex desktop app, which frustrated users who struggled to find basic features like chat history, Brockman conceded the interface is "kind of a mess." He described the current tabbed layout as "incremental progress towards the future" and said the separate Work tab should disappear by year's end, with agentic functionality folding seamlessly into ChatGPT.9to5mac

Despite the rocky rollout, Brockman said Codex grew from 5 to 10 million users within days of the merger. When pressed on whether that spike simply resulted from "shoehorning" Codex into the main app, he acknowledged the point but argued the goal is to bring agentic AI "to mass consumer scale."9to5mac