More details about OpenAI’s AI device: Palm-sized with multiple cameras potentially

Details about the AI companion device from OpenAI and former Apple design head Jony Ive are slowly trickling out.

A new report from the Financial Times, which detailed some of the challenges the most valuable private company is running into developing the device that’s set to launch next year, adds some more clues.

• The personal assistant will be “palm-sized” or “roughly the size of a smartphone.”

• It will be “always on,” so it won’t need a wake word like Amazon’s Alexa.

• Users will communicate with the device “through a camera, microphone and speaker.” Another person told the FT there could be “multiple cameras.”

Here’s what we knew earlier this year:

• The devices are meant to be “companions” that are part of everyday life.

• They will be “fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, [and] able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

• Developers are conceiving of it as a third device people will need, in addition to an iPhone and a MacBook Pro.

• It’s not a phone or glasses and is meant to wean users off screens.

• It could include headphones or cameras.

• OpenAI plans to ship 100 million of these devices “faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million of something new before.”

• The company expects to release a device by late 2026.

• It’s not going to kill the iPhone: “In the same way that the smartphone didn’t make the laptop go away, I don’t think our first thing is going to make the smartphone go away,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Bloomberg. “It is a totally new kind of thing.”

We’re still hoping the device will look like Ive’s recently released $4,800 sailing lantern.