22 May 2025
OpenAI is planning to develop AI “companion” devices that will integrate artificial intelligence capabilities with everyday life, potentially opening the door to a new high-tech innovation used alongside laptops and smartphones.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he and designer Jony Ive are developing these secret devices for mass consumption, with plans to ship 100 million units upon launch.
Ives joined OpenAI after his startup, io, was acquired by Altman’s company in a $6.5 billion deal, the Journal reported on May 21.
Neither Altman nor Ives specified what these companion devices would look like or how they would operate. Ives simply referred to them as a “new design movement” that would be similar to Apple’s family of hardware and software integrations.
OpenAI has raised billions of dollars from investors, who view the company as a stalwart in the AI industry following the overwhelming success of its ChatGPT large language model (LLM). As of May, ChatGPT had nearly 800 million weekly active users, according to industry data.
These usage trends were behind OpenAI’s massive $157 billion valuation as of October 2024 — a figure that nearly doubled to $300 billion by March 2025.
Related: Microsoft and OpenAI renegotiate investment deal: Report
Not the first “secret” project
In addition to its secretive companion devices, OpenAI’s ambitions extend to social media, where the company plans to take on Elon Musk’s X and Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta platforms, according to an April 15 report by The Verge.
The new social media platform will reportedly combine ChatGPT’s image generation capabilities with a social media feed similar to X’s. It’s unclear whether the new social media platform would launch as a standalone product or be incorporated into ChatGPT.
The blend between AI and social media has also bled into the blockchain industry, with several startups utilizing these technologies to build AI agents, LLM tools and decentralized social media networks.
As Cointelegraph reported, Validation Cloud recently deployed an LLM on the Hedera network, giving decentralized finance users the ability to query blockchain data more easily.
Related: OpenAI’s Altman appears to reject Musk’s $97.4B bid for control