OpenAI's new partnership with famed iPhone designer Jony Ive has the rumor mill churning — and the latest may give you a guffaw.

According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, Ive and Altman's secretive AI companion device — news of which leaked to the Wall Street Journal last week — may look a lot like an iPod shuffle, but worn on a string around your neck, like a preposterous AI-inflected statement necklace.

"The current prototype is slightly larger than [Humane's] AI Pin, with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle," Kuo said in a lengthy X post shortly after OpenAI announced that it was purchasing io, Ive's hardware company. "The design and specifications may change before mass production."

Per the analyst's research, "one of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck," and although it won't have any screens, it may "have cameras and microphones for environmental detection," which could well jibe with Altman's claim in the employee call announcing the project that the device will be "fully aware" of its surroundings.

To us, this product sounds like a yassified version of Humane's disastrous AI pin, which itself was the size of a smart watch face and sucked so comprehensively that more people returned the $700 disaster than purchased it, forcing the company into a speedy total collapse.

As such, Kuo's take isn't exactly optimistic for OpenAI.

"In my view, one of OpenAI's motives for announcing its collaboration with Jony Ive now is likely to shift market focus from [Google's recent I/O conference]," the Apple analyst wrote. "Google’s ecosystem and AI integration, showcased in the I/O keynotes, pose a challenge that OpenAI currently struggles to address. As a result, OpenAI is leveraging a new narrative to redirect attention."

(There are a few other things OpenAI may want to redirect market attention away from as well, including ChatGPT's very public woes and warning signs of yet another leadership shakeup after Altman announced that he was creating a new "CEO" position that reports directly to him, which will offload much of his own work onto that new executive, Instacart's Fidji Simo.)

Looking at the bigger picture, Kuo noted that OpenAI's still-unconfirmed new AI gadget is part of a broader trend towards so-called "physical AI," which he described as "AI integrated real-world" — another sign that OpenAI is now following the herd instead of leading it.

"While the success of the Jony Ive-OpenAI partnership remains uncertain," the researcher mused, "it clearly aligns with this trend."

Kuo then went on to cite programming pioneer Alan Kay, who famously said that "people who are really serious about software should make their own hardware."

It is indeed a big step for OpenAI to be making its own devices — though at first bluff, there's nothing terribly impressive about a derivative form factor that looks like an iPod Shuffle.

More on wearables: New Wearable for Exceptionally Pathetic Men Detects When Their Wife Is Cheating


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