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The Rumored OpenAI Device: Is it Really a Pen? · In the Loop AI

0:00
Josh: For the last three years, AI has been this disembodied superpower.
0:03
Josh: It lives in tabs, it lives in chat windows, you summon it, you type to it,
0:07
Josh: sometimes you even speak to it, it comes and then it vanishes.
0:10
Josh: It's powerful, but it is trapped behind this glass.
0:13
Josh: And then last week, we have one of the most exciting rumors to pop up in this
0:16
Josh: world, which is around OpenAI and their new hardware device offering.
0:20
Josh: OpenAI, they partnered with Johnny Ive, who has created devices including,
0:23
Josh: but not limited to, the iPhone, the iPod, the MacBook, basically any hardware
0:28
Josh: device that you've used.
0:30
Josh: Uh johnny ive has designed it if it's come from apple and what's
0:33
Josh: fascinating about this is the rumor isn't telling us
0:36
Josh: that they're going to be choosing glasses everyone's choosing
0:39
Josh: glasses meta has them google's working on them apple's working
0:42
Josh: on them but this form factor this time is different and we're going to answer
0:46
Josh: the question as to why on this episode and what makes this device so important
0:49
Josh: and different in a world where everyone's seemingly failing right ijaz like
0:53
Josh: if i think about all the other companies who have tried to build an ai first
0:57
Josh: hardware device they've all been failing miserably. We talked about the Meta Ray-Ban displays.
1:01
Josh: We can't even get our hands on them. The demos are clunky. It doesn't work.
1:04
Josh: We have companies like Humane and Rabi.
1:06
Josh: And we have another one this week called Pickle.
1:09
Josh: And none of them seem to work. So OpenAI is going in a different direction.
1:12
Josh: And I kind of want to talk about why they're making this decision to go one
1:16
Josh: way when everyone else is going the other.
1:18
Ejaaz: I think the toll of wasted money on kind of defunct AI hardware products is
1:24
Ejaaz: now surpassing about $10 billion.
1:27
Ejaaz: It's a mixture of like VC funded crap. And then you've got even the big boys
1:32
Ejaaz: like Meta releasing sunglasses, which then suck.
1:36
Ejaaz: It's pretty insane to think, Josh, that it's been less than a year since OpenAI
1:41
Ejaaz: announced their kind of like entry into consumer hardware.
1:46
Ejaaz: For folks who don't know, So OpenAI basically acquired Johnny Ives hardware startup called I.O.
1:54
Ejaaz: For six and a half billion dollars repeatedly, a mixture of cash and equity
1:59
Ejaaz: at the time, which was their largest acquisition to date, I still think.
2:04
Ejaaz: And there was a lot of speculation and rumors around what that device might
2:08
Ejaaz: be that they're building.
2:10
Ejaaz: And we actually put out an episode early last year, I think it was during May,
2:14
Ejaaz: actually, where you and I speculated about what that form factor might look like.
2:18
Ejaaz: And I remember we settled on two devices, Josh, it was the glasses,
2:23
Ejaaz: where they would have like microphones that could like listen to you,
2:26
Ejaaz: but also kind of like speakers that could blare audio back to you.
2:30
Ejaaz: Obviously, the lenses would act as with like a camera that can kind of see what
2:34
Ejaaz: you do. It's kind of like this multimodal type of device.
2:36
Ejaaz: And then the alternative was kind of like this puck-shaped disc that could like
2:41
Ejaaz: sit on your desk or sit in your pocket that might have eyes and visions.
2:45
Ejaaz: We were wrong on both accounts.
2:48
Ejaaz: If this leak that we're showing on our screen right now is true.
2:52
Ejaaz: So the tweet goes, additional details about OpenAI's device.
2:56
Ejaaz: And it goes on to kind of describe this iPod shuffle type device,
3:01
Ejaaz: which takes the form of a pen device, which will have a sort of camera.
3:06
Ejaaz: Microphone, but kind of like ambient presence in your pocket where you can kind
3:11
Ejaaz: of like take out, you can write,
3:13
Ejaaz: the device will kind of detect the kind of motion of your hand and understand
3:17
Ejaaz: and transcribe those words that are written into your chat GPT interface.
3:22
Ejaaz: So there's like this weird link between real life ambient presence and chat
3:27
Ejaaz: GPT, which you and I are familiar with today.
3:30
Josh: So per that episode last year, we may have been wrong on some things,
3:33
Josh: but I don't think we were wrong on all of them and i
3:36
Josh: still feel pretty good about the direction that we're heading in so this
3:39
Josh: says pen shaped device integrates ai lightweight highly portable about the size
3:44
Josh: of an ipod shuffle can be carried in a pocket worn around the neck it'll include
3:48
Josh: a microphone and a camera and it'll be able to convert handwritten notes directly
3:52
Josh: to text and instantly upload them to chat gpt so if we the the.
3:56
Ejaaz: Ipod shuffle by the way for anyone who
3:59
Ejaaz: who is not a dinosaur that could get an idea of what this looked like.
4:03
Josh: So I wanted to include this picture because I think it's important to help understand the form factor.
4:08
Josh: I think when a lot of people think about this, and when we first thought about
4:11
Josh: it, it was more of a rounded shape just because if you're designing these things
4:14
Josh: from first principles, that kind of made sense to put on a desk, right?
4:17
Josh: Like if you're designing one of these devices, you want it to see, you want it to hear.
4:21
Josh: What materials does that look like? What shape does it have to take?
4:24
Josh: How do the cameras have to interact with the materials?
4:26
Josh: We kind of concluded on this like little round puck
4:29
Josh: shape it appears as if the shape is wrong but the sensors are still
4:32
Josh: correct it still has the ability to see it still has the
4:34
Josh: ability to hear and it still will likely be this always on thing it will just
4:39
Josh: come in a form that's maybe a little more wearable as jewelry or fits easier
4:43
Josh: into your pocket that's what it seems like this is and i took the ipod shuffle
4:47
Josh: first generation because ijaz if you notice on that image it actually has a
4:51
Josh: little string around it to put around your neck and to wear it.
4:55
Josh: So this has actually been done before in the very first generation of the iPod.
5:00
Josh: What happens if you take this very portable device and you just add the new
5:04
Josh: 21st century technology that wasn't available when this thing first came out?
5:07
Josh: You get something that can see, that can hear, that can speak back to you.
5:11
Josh: And it creates this really interesting thing. Now we have some renderings of
5:14
Josh: what people suspect this will look like.
5:16
Josh: Ejaz, how do you imagine this actually plays out when we get it?
5:20
Ejaaz: Well, it's really interesting. The number one term that's used to describe this
5:24
Ejaaz: new advice since the news came out is pen.
5:27
Ejaaz: And so the code name for this device, by the way, is Gumdrop.
5:31
Ejaaz: The concepts people have drawn up is literally a pen.
5:34
Ejaaz: And it kind of looks like, Josh, I don't know whether you ever bought one of these junk tech things.
5:39
Ejaaz: But do you remember the pens that had a USB-C?
5:42
Ejaaz: Sorry, USB-C. A USB stick within them?
5:45
Ejaaz: They were like really chunky pens and you could write and then you could unscrew
5:48
Ejaaz: the cap and suddenly, wow hey you've got like a memory stick here this kind
5:52
Ejaaz: of looks like that and i and i hope it's it's not something like that but i
5:56
Ejaaz: i get what they're going for and and here's my take um
6:00
Ejaaz: One, I kind of weirdly like that it's not another screen.
6:05
Ejaaz: I'm tired of like having like a laptop and then a cell phone and then you had like the Apple iWatch.
6:11
Ejaaz: There's too many screens involved here. I like that they've gone with a potentially
6:14
Ejaaz: kind of a non-impactful device that I can just kind of put down and not acknowledge,
6:21
Ejaaz: but is still so aware of everything.
6:23
Ejaaz: It's consuming maybe audio that I'm ingesting or it's seeing what I'm seeing.
6:28
Ejaaz: I quite like the hands-off approach.
6:31
Ejaaz: Number two, I like that it's mini.
6:34
Ejaaz: It's funny. You mentioned that the pen could potentially be on a piece of string
6:40
Ejaaz: like we're showing on the screen here with the iPod Shuffle.
6:43
Ejaaz: It's giving me a friend.com vibes, Josh. Do you remember that device where it's like a pendant?
6:48
Josh: I do it a little round circle. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
6:50
Ejaaz: Exactly. Well, it's like a pendant that goes around your neck.
6:53
Ejaaz: I'm kind of hoping it's not going to look like that. it's going to look like
6:56
Ejaaz: a weird kind of jade totem crystal type thing.
6:59
Ejaaz: But I appreciate that it's going to be non-impactful.
7:03
Ejaaz: And then my other thought about this is I like that it is ingesting types of
7:09
Ejaaz: data, which I'm not usually focused on. Okay, so what do I mean by that?
7:14
Ejaaz: Humans to date have been the processes of information, right?
7:18
Ejaaz: So we ingest all of this audio and visual stuff, We process it in our brain,
7:22
Ejaaz: and then we stuff it into a laptop or a mobile phone. It comes in the form of text.
7:27
Ejaaz: It comes in the form of TikToks that we film or whatever, but it's pre-processed in our human brains.
7:33
Ejaaz: What's different with this device is it'll do the processing for us because
7:37
Ejaaz: we've built this kind of like AI model already. And that's what's super exciting for me.
7:41
Josh: Yeah. If we look at that pen again, I feel like I can say with almost 100% conviction
7:46
Josh: that it will not actually be a pen.
7:49
Josh: A pen, like if I put myself in Johnny's shoes, a pen is such a horrible form
7:53
Josh: factor. There's so many different types of pens.
7:54
Josh: There's fountain pens. There's the like different tips for pens.
7:57
Josh: There's different inks for pens. There's this huge preference stack that people
8:00
Josh: have and feel very strongly about because they've been writing with pens their whole life.
8:03
Josh: And trying to cater to those people without creating a huge amount of SKUs that
8:08
Josh: satisfy the preferences of each one of these people seems very complicated.
8:12
Josh: How do you choose the quality of the ink?
8:13
Josh: How do you replace the ink when it goes out? It just adds too much complexity
8:17
Josh: to a device that should not be that complex.
8:19
Josh: But I think the form factor is probably some hybrid between the pen and the
8:23
Josh: iPod shuffle, like a pendant type thing.
8:25
Josh: It makes sense. And then we have to talk about like the bet,
8:28
Josh: like why are they doing this EJS? And you started touching on parts of that.
8:31
Josh: But the idea is that currently the phone is it's intentional computing right now.
8:35
Josh: You have to go seek these things out or perhaps they come to you,
8:38
Josh: but they come to you in a noisy way.
8:39
Josh: Where you go to your phone to send a text message, you go to do a Google search,
8:42
Josh: you go to check social media or check whatever algorithm is going to keep you hooked on this device.
8:49
Josh: These AI hardware devices, particularly this one without a screen,
8:52
Josh: it aims for this ambient computing.
8:54
Josh: It's something that's always there. It's always listening. It's always seeing.
8:57
Josh: And it's not only waiting to help, but it's proactively seeking ways in which it can help.
9:03
Josh: And we've seen this previously through a feature that OpenAI actually released
9:07
Josh: in the past called Pulse, where if you remember Pulse, what it does overnight
9:11
Josh: is it'll take all the queries that you had from the previous day.
9:14
Josh: It'll do some extra research. It'll kind of figure out what you're most likely
9:17
Josh: to be curious about the following day.
9:19
Josh: And then you wake up in the morning and it'll have all the answers and all of
9:22
Josh: these unique facts and things that you didn't know you wanted presented to you first thing.
9:27
Josh: And it's this really valuable resource in the first step that they're taking
9:30
Josh: towards becoming this predictive ambient AI that knows what you want before you even ask for it.
9:37
Josh: Now, a second thing is happening that is confirming these suspicions.
9:39
Josh: And it's the company shakeup that's actually happening within OpenAI right now.
9:43
Josh: There are recent reports that happened earlier this week, and it talked about
9:47
Josh: the shakeup that they're doing towards creating a better voice team.
9:51
Ejaaz: Yeah, and I think this is the perfect time for a device like this to come out
9:55
Ejaaz: because AI models aren't just LLMs anymore.
9:59
Ejaaz: They ingest video and produce video. They ingest audio and produce audio to
10:04
Ejaaz: a really good quality output.
10:06
Ejaaz: I think Google's Gemini is probably the best or the leader here,
10:10
Ejaaz: right? They've got VO3 on the video side.
10:12
Ejaaz: They have translation AIs and they have one of the best LLMs there is out there.
10:16
Ejaaz: And it all kind of combines and melds into this one product,
10:19
Ejaaz: into this one model, which can kind of spit out any type of medium for you, right?
10:24
Ejaaz: If you had a device that now ingests all of those different types of data that
10:28
Ejaaz: is around you, you'll probably end up having a richer AI experience.
10:32
Ejaaz: So I think that's what OpenAI is really going for. It's not like this fancy
10:35
Ejaaz: device that kind of like does a crazy magic tricks for you. It's kind of like
10:39
Ejaaz: an advanced sensor that can speak to you and hear and see the things that you guys see.
10:44
Ejaaz: And actually, on that note, a bit of evidence that broke out this week is that
10:50
Ejaaz: OpenAI is working on a new voice model.
10:53
Ejaaz: And this was leaked by the information where basically, if you've ever used
10:57
Ejaaz: ChatGPT or if you're, I don't know if you need to be a pro user to get this.
11:00
Ejaaz: I think anyone can actually use it.
11:02
Ejaaz: But there's a smart voice mode where you can basically talk to ChatGPT and it
11:06
Ejaaz: is really, really good. In fact, there's like zero hesitation between me stopping
11:10
Ejaaz: talking and then someone responding for me.
11:13
Ejaaz: But then if I interrupt, it kind of there's this awkward interjection where
11:16
Ejaaz: it kind of like stops and starts.
11:18
Ejaaz: This new voice model is basically going to be like superior as if you're speaking
11:22
Ejaaz: to a natural human in normal human tones. But also it'll be perfected for the
11:28
Ejaaz: device that they're building and releasing later this year.
11:31
Josh: Yeah. So why is 2026 the year of AI hardware? I guess to summarize,
11:36
Josh: there's these three converging forces.
11:38
Josh: There's, like you mentioned earlier, AI becoming multimodal.
11:40
Josh: It has voice, vision, context.
11:42
Josh: And the hardware part suddenly makes sense.
11:45
Josh: Then there's people who are just tired of screens.
11:48
Josh: Everyone is just kind of sick at scrolling. I don't know if they're sick,
11:51
Josh: but they're getting sick by scrolling Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, the whole thing.
11:54
Josh: It's just screens are very invasive. And there's very few passive ambient technologies
11:59
Josh: that don't ask for your attention.
12:01
Josh: Instead, they deliver you value. And then three is the distribution plus platform power.
12:05
Josh: I mean, the next battle of who owns the AI interface isn't just the model, it's the entire stack.
12:11
Josh: It's the, is it used on your mobile apps? Is it used, how do you inject yourself
12:16
Josh: into more of these people's lives?
12:17
Josh: And I think the distribution and platform power is something that OpenAI has
12:20
Josh: a huge advantage when it comes to.
12:22
Ejaaz: Josh, how much do you think this, if you had to guess, this device would cost? Yeah.
12:28
Josh: I suspect it'll be under $200. And my hope is that it'll be under $100.
12:33
Josh: And the reasoning is because OpenAI, I mean, by the time they release this,
12:37
Josh: they might have one and a half billion weekly active users.
12:40
Josh: It's this astronomically large user base.
12:43
Josh: And OpenAI, if no one knows this, they haven't exactly produced hardware in the past.
12:47
Josh: They don't have the distribution. They don't have the supply chain that a company
12:51
Josh: like Apple has, where they can create tens to hundreds of millions of iPhones every single year.
12:56
Josh: So the way you get around this is to dumb down the device to a point in which
13:00
Josh: you can manufacture it at scale in a cost-effective way without needing to create any sort of,
13:07
Josh: very eccentric frontier technology that is required for production.
13:12
Josh: Like with glasses, it's very cutting edge. It's very difficult because it's a hardware problem.
13:16
Josh: With OpenAI's device, I suspect they will make the hardware be basically trivial.
13:21
Josh: I mean, you just need a few sensors. You need a camera, you need a gyroscope, you need a microphone.
13:25
Josh: And the hope is that it will actually be underwhelming to a lot of people.
13:28
Josh: When you see the final form, it's probably going to look pretty dumb.
13:30
Josh: It's not going to be this crazy, beautiful, fancy device.
13:33
Josh: It's just going to be a device that is going to be supercharged by the software
13:37
Josh: stack instead of cutting-edge manufacturing techniques on the hardware.
13:40
Ejaaz: Well also glasses are super
13:43
Ejaaz: imposing on the average user right you're going over the most
13:46
Ejaaz: sensitive uh organ of their of their entire body which is like their eyes which
13:51
Ejaaz: they use every day right it's very personal whereas the hardware device that
13:54
Ejaaz: open air is working on appears hidden yet present if that if that makes sense
14:00
Ejaaz: yeah the other point I'll make is it definitely makes sense for it to be cheaper.
14:05
Ejaaz: I see this as kind of like how Amazon priced Alexa or Google priced,
14:11
Ejaaz: I've forgotten what their hardware device is actually,
14:14
Ejaaz: but the point is you want to get this out to as many users as you can and if
14:17
Ejaaz: you want to do that you probably need to price it really attractively.
14:20
Ejaaz: You're not going to price this like an expensive iPhone, at least in the first
14:25
Ejaaz: wave of getting this device.
14:26
Ejaaz: You want to get it into as many people hands as possible because the feedback
14:30
Ejaaz: loop for OpenAI is they, in return,
14:33
Ejaaz: all this amazing data, which they can then make a crazy model for the future. So it makes sense.
14:39
Ejaaz: But Josh, it hasn't prevented people from releasing more smart glasses.
14:45
Josh: Nobody learns, man. I swear. And nobody looks at the previous failures and says,
14:51
Josh: oh, maybe I shouldn't try that.
14:53
Josh: They're just doing the same thing over and over again. And every single time it fails miserably.
14:57
Josh: And not to ruin the plot here, but there's a
15:00
Josh: new glasses company that was announced this week called pickle
15:03
Josh: one the first soul computer they're calling
15:06
Josh: it don't ask me what a soul computer what's a soul computer josh
15:10
Josh: i have no clue dude they're just trying to market this
15:13
Josh: thing and the marketing video was quite good i mean the glasses if you
15:16
Josh: ask me they look beautiful on screen we're looking at these kind of futuristic silver
15:19
Josh: glasses with clear lenses and the demo looked awesome it was this like really
15:24
Josh: cool overlay into the real world and it showed you these like like rideshare
15:29
Josh: instructions and navigation and it's everything that we dream an augmented reality
15:33
Josh: device will be the unfortunate reality was is that this demo,
15:38
Josh: wasn't even a demo it was just kind of this computer graphic imaging to make
15:43
Josh: it look like a demo to sell the vision of something that doesn't exist and this
15:47
Josh: came in the form of this kind of expose if you will you just if you want to
15:52
Josh: share the details that came from within this and why in particular,
15:55
Josh: this is still an impossibility.
15:57
Ejaaz: Yeah, so basically this guy called Matthew Dowd, who has been kind of like the
16:02
Ejaaz: most vocal opponent to this Pickle 1 announcement, which got everyone excited,
16:08
Ejaaz: basically pointed out some simple things, which is like, huh,
16:12
Ejaaz: in theory, if you wanted to create a pair of glasses that look like this,
16:15
Ejaaz: you would need to get the costs of these components down
16:19
Ejaaz: Five to 10x from what it is currently today. So he kind of basically pushed
16:24
Ejaaz: back, he found some inaccuracies on the website versus what the founder was
16:28
Ejaaz: also pitching in his demo video as well, and vocally on X.
16:32
Ejaaz: So he these kind of discrepancies plus his expertise in hardware basically pointed
16:36
Ejaaz: out that this pickle device is probably not real.
16:39
Ejaaz: And it points towards a team that hasn't really figured out how they're going
16:43
Ejaaz: to build these glasses. And this kind of like, reflects a lot of the conversation
16:47
Ejaaz: you and I have had on AI hardware glasses, Josh, which is in concept,
16:51
Ejaaz: in theory, it sounds great.
16:53
Ejaaz: And Meta has probably been the only company that's got the closest to putting
16:58
Ejaaz: out something that is actually real.
17:00
Ejaaz: Although we saw that transpire really badly in real time on stage when they
17:05
Ejaaz: demoed the product and three out of five of their demos completely flopped.
17:09
Ejaaz: And the ones that did work also kind of sucked.
17:12
Ejaaz: So it's not really useful for you and we don't think it's
17:15
Ejaaz: practical or i don't think it's practical right now to be able to build something
17:18
Ejaaz: like this now has this random dude in south korea uh calling his product pickle
17:24
Ejaaz: pulled it out the bag maybe um he's kind of quoted to use a snapdragon processor
17:30
Ejaaz: which is a qualcomm based chip uh maybe he's figured something out um
17:35
Ejaaz: From the visual side of things, Josh, I don't know about you,
17:38
Ejaaz: but I don't really like the look of this.
17:40
Ejaaz: It's giving a Google Glass version one, which is funny because Google Glass
17:44
Ejaaz: is supposedly going to be releasing their V2 sometime this quarter as well.
17:48
Ejaaz: Excited to see what this is.
17:49
Ejaaz: Now, to kind of like put my other hat on this, Josh, like, listen,
17:52
Ejaaz: I'm not going to buy Pickle. I've been burned already with the Vets for Brakepads display.
17:57
Ejaaz: But why do you think so many companies are focused on building glasses.
18:03
Ejaaz: Like, it seems kind of weird that you have like, what, four,
18:07
Ejaaz: five major companies and some startups focusing solely on the visual aspect
18:11
Ejaaz: on these glasses form factor.
18:13
Ejaaz: We even speculated that that's the most likely probable device.
18:16
Ejaaz: And then you have OpenAI kind of going with this pendant approach.
18:19
Ejaaz: Like, do you think both companies or both approaches are wrong or one is more right than the other?
18:23
Josh: I actually think both approaches are right. I think the timing is wrong.
18:28
Josh: And I actually, I shared one of the posts that I shared because it made sense
18:31
Josh: when you build hardware, there's, you can win on two merits, right?
18:36
Josh: You have either manufacturing innovation or software novelty.
18:40
Josh: And if you don't have one of those two things, your competitors become Apple,
18:44
Josh: Google, Meta, OpenAI, who's trying to build this manufacturing innovation themselves.
18:50
Josh: So Pickle is unfortunately coming with neither of those things.
18:53
Josh: It has no breakthrough manufacturing techniques? Or does it have any software
18:57
Josh: novelty that creates this.
18:58
Josh: Amazingly magical experience. So therefore, they're competing directly with
19:02
Josh: Meta, directly with Apple on supply chains that they very much have a monopoly
19:06
Josh: on when it comes to the cutting edge, when it comes to these two nanometer chips
19:10
Josh: that are so small, and they're the only things that are possible for glasses.
19:13
Josh: The problem is that they just don't have that.
19:16
Josh: OpenAI, on the other hand, is taking the opposite approach. They are taking
19:19
Josh: the non-elegant or perhaps non-complex hardware approach in hopes that they
19:24
Josh: will have unbelievable software novelty.
19:26
Josh: They'll give you this tiny little device. It's not going to look that flashy,
19:30
Josh: but the idea is that the software behind it will be so impressive that it will
19:33
Josh: stand out amongst the pack.
19:35
Josh: It's very clear to me, and I think everyone, that glasses are a form factor
19:38
Josh: of the future, and they have a very promising future.
19:41
Josh: It's just the technology to manufacture them at scale, at a quality that is
19:45
Josh: acceptable to the average user, is not there, nor will it be there really soon.
19:49
Josh: It's very difficult technology.
19:51
Josh: There's a lot of complex problems to solve, and it's very expensive to solve
19:53
Josh: them. So I don't feel good about it.
19:56
Ejaaz: It's funny. I think my major takeaway from this discussion with you is the only
20:01
Ejaaz: thing that's certain is the uncertainty of the next few years and what these
20:05
Ejaaz: devices are going to look like.
20:06
Ejaaz: We are just going to be in uncharted territory, and it's going to take a few
20:10
Ejaaz: different versions of these devices to kind of nail it.
20:13
Ejaaz: Because let's be frank, AI models aren't at their end form right now, right?
20:18
Ejaaz: We're going from LLMs to these kind of weird voice.
20:21
Ejaaz: And now, oh, wait, it's spitting out video and Nano Banana from Google can edit
20:25
Ejaaz: images. And we've got to combine and package all of these multimodal types of
20:30
Ejaaz: things into a singular experience. And that's going to be aided by some kind of a device.
20:34
Ejaaz: Now, we can speculate all we want about whether it's going to be glasses or
20:37
Ejaaz: whether it's going to be some kind of puck device or a pendant.
20:41
Ejaaz: We don't know. And I'm just excited that these companies are investing billions
20:45
Ejaaz: of dollars to try and figure this problem out, because I think it's going to
20:48
Ejaaz: be the cell phone moment.
20:50
Ejaaz: I think it's going to be the PC moment and I cannot wait to live through all three of those, right?
20:54
Ejaaz: It's going to be kind of technology supercharged. But listen,
20:58
Ejaaz: I do have one request, Josh. What's that? As long as it doesn't look like this.
21:03
Ejaaz: As long as it doesn't look like some kind of pin device that I slap on my shirt
21:08
Ejaaz: and that I have to hold my hand out. Do you remember the humane pin?
21:12
Josh: Yeah, to quote Marques Brownlee, the worst product I've ever reviewed.
21:16
Josh: To me, the form factor here actually isn't the problem. And I think we do have
21:21
Josh: a pretty clear view of what the form of these things is going to look like.
21:24
Josh: We will have glasses. We will have this pendant shaped thing. We will have a TV.
21:29
Josh: We will have a desktop device, a countertop device. The reality is, is it's distributed.
21:34
Josh: It becomes a suite of devices. The wild card, the thing that is most exciting
21:38
Josh: is how these devices actually deliver value to us.
21:42
Josh: Like if we look at the Humane Pin, the reason why it was so bad isn't because
21:46
Josh: the idea was bad. It was because the actual execution was so poor.
21:50
Josh: It's that the hardware was kind of clunky.
21:53
Josh: The software didn't actually deliver any real value. It took so much longer
21:56
Josh: than your iPhone to generate the value that you wanted to extract from it.
21:59
Josh: But if it actually delivered on the promises it made, I would have had one on my shirt right now.
22:04
Josh: It would have been the best device there is. So the problem is it's a combination
22:08
Josh: of both things. And we see it here again with the Rabbit R1.
22:11
Josh: Oh my gosh, I almost forgot about this. Throwback.
22:14
Ejaaz: Yeah, this was a device that was released in 2024 and kind of like projected
22:18
Ejaaz: a lot of the concepts that we are talking about and discussing right now,
22:23
Ejaaz: but in a really mundane and kind of like analog way.
22:29
Ejaaz: It flopped. It ended up not becoming a thing. or I think maybe they're releasing
22:32
Ejaaz: version two, but I get your point, Josh.
22:37
Ejaaz: I think, I guess the way I think about it is
22:41
Ejaaz: The end form is going to be chips in our brain.
22:46
Ejaaz: And I know that sounds probably insane to a lot of you listening to this,
22:49
Ejaaz: but it makes sense that like the human brain becomes the kind of end goal for
22:55
Ejaaz: what a computer will be, right?
22:56
Ejaaz: Instead of relying on glasses and mechanical hardware, we just use our own eyes
23:01
Ejaaz: or an artificial brain that works with our brain.
23:03
Ejaaz: So kind of like a human robot or human computer hybrid.
23:07
Ejaaz: And so any kind of device that acts as a sensor to input and augment any kind
23:14
Ejaaz: of information that we ingest that isn't just words, it could be audio,
23:19
Ejaaz: it could be video, it could be any other form factor, makes sense.
23:23
Ejaaz: And so I don't know whether it'll be a suite of these things.
23:26
Ejaaz: It probably will be a suite of devices, I guess.
23:28
Ejaaz: Maybe OpenAI becomes the sole supplier to all of these, or maybe we just buy
23:32
Ejaaz: a bunch of devices from all different kinds of things.
23:34
Ejaaz: I don't see the latter playing out because to your earlier point,
23:38
Ejaaz: you kind of want the distribution and the platform if you want to own that kind
23:42
Ejaaz: of cohesive experience.
23:44
Ejaaz: So, you know, maybe this is the first of many devices from OpenAI.
23:47
Josh: Yeah, it requires like a fundamental rethinking of the word device.
23:52
Josh: Like if I could imagine what the future of this looks like, it actually becomes
23:56
Josh: inverted where the device is the AI.
23:58
Josh: It's the intelligence. and the intelligence is this modular thing that manifests
24:02
Josh: itself through a suite of devices that's always around you.
24:06
Josh: When you wear this pendant around your neck,
24:09
Josh: it has the same exact context window as the TV on your screen,
24:12
Josh: which is connected to the small desktop thing on your desk, which is connected
24:16
Josh: to the display in your kitchen that is your like heads up display.
24:20
Josh: It's all one universal thing.
24:22
Josh: And the actual product becomes the hardware.
24:25
Josh: It becomes your preference stack within that AI.
24:28
Josh: So it really understands you deeply. And I think that is the way that we remove
24:32
Josh: ourselves from the screens is by just putting this intelligence all around us.
24:36
Josh: That's why it's considered ambient.
24:38
Josh: It's because it's always there. It's always around us. And this OpenAI device
24:41
Josh: is the first iteration of what that could look like, physically manifested as a product.
24:47
Josh: So that's kind of it. That's where we're at. I'm hoping that they're going to
24:51
Josh: release this thing or tease this thing sometime this year.
24:54
Josh: It's moving slow, but progress is being made. And we were finally starting to
24:57
Josh: get some leaks, which means it's at least going into tooling.
25:00
Josh: They're figuring out where they want to manufacture it.
25:02
Josh: Things are happening here. And I'm really excited for them to happen in a big way. Thank you.
25:06
Ejaaz: Yeah, I think optimistically, we're going to see what this device release might
25:11
Ejaaz: look like, I think in Q3 or Q4 of this year, which would be crazy.
25:16
Ejaaz: They're already engaged in manufacturing contracts with Foxconn in Vietnam.
25:20
Ejaaz: And rumors say that they also might be building a manufacturing plant in the US as well.
25:26
Ejaaz: The reason why it was delayed in the first place, fun fact, was because it was in China.
25:29
Ejaaz: And as you know, America doesn't really get along with China of right now,
25:32
Ejaaz: especially in this AI race. So it's important to have everything onshore.
25:36
Ejaaz: But yeah, that is it. I cannot wait to get my hands on one of these devices, Josh.
25:40
Ejaaz: We have been speculating about this stuff for six months now.
25:45
Ejaaz: And it would be nice to get a device in our hands that we can kind of like play
25:48
Ejaaz: around with and maybe even bring onto the show and augment this entire experience for you guys.
25:55
Josh: That is it. I have two hopes for this year.
25:59
Josh: One of them is that we get to see what this open AI device is.
26:02
Josh: The second one is that we get a good pair of glasses. My God.
26:05
Josh: Can someone please make a good pair of glasses?
26:07
Ejaaz: Google Glass 2. I don't care who makes it. I'm holding out. I don't care who makes it.
26:10
Josh: Make it good. Make it so that I can put it on my face. I want so badly to wear
26:14
Josh: glasses, but every product sucks.
26:16
Josh: So whatever we've got to do, figure it out, deploy those. Those are the two
26:19
Josh: things I will be stoked in the world of AI hardware.
26:21
Josh: If we get glasses and this ambient device from OpenAI.
26:25
Josh: But that's the hardware update. That's what's going on. Now you know about as
26:28
Josh: much as we do, about as much as everybody except for Sam and Johnny,
26:31
Josh: who are in the lab, hopefully cooking up something remarkable.
26:34
Josh: And we'll just, we'll stay up to date with all these things as always.
26:38
Josh: And see you guys in the next episode.
26:40
Ejaaz: Don't forget to like and subscribe, turn on the notifications,
26:44
Ejaaz: subscribe to our newsletter, all of those things, please.
26:46
Ejaaz: Lots more information coming to you pretty soon. See you folks.