Tag: hardware

OpenAI’s next hardware device is a screenless, smart home speaker

The new device is supposedly «something to take a bite of» per previous reporting, and will look nothing like this. (Picture: generated)
Jony Ive’s first hardware device for OpenAI will be a movable, screen-free speaker with a camera and sensors to understand the environment, Bloomberg reports. It can control other smart home appliances and lets you talk to a customized, more personalized ChatGPT.

The speaker is slated for launch later this year, but won’t actually ship until sometime in 2027. It is one of about five devices slated for launch soon, Bloomberg says.

It will proactively reach out once it gets to know you, comes with a battery to move easily between rooms, and can do things like play music, answer messages or stay chatting, apparently with «personality.»

It will be powered by an advanced version of GPT-Live, and will be more than just talking to ChatGPT. Bloomberg says it will be more of a human-like companion, becoming an «expert on the user» over time.

The speaker also has mechanical elements that move on their own to «connect on a humanlike level with users»

OpenAI believes the device won’t be affected by the recent lawsuit on trade secrets from Apple, Bloomberg says, as it is a new class of devices not found anywhere else. Apple does make speakers, though, like the HomePod.

Read more: Bloomberg (paywalled), Slashdot, MacRumors, TechCrunch, and The Verge.

Apple sues OpenAI over hardware secrets, calls unit «rotten to the core»

A jury will have to decide if OpenAI is guilty of systematic theft of Apple secrets (Picture: generated)
The lawsuit from Apple is a damning indictment of OpenAI for stealing technology, prototypes, business processes and even partner manufacturers through Apple’s former employees, 9to5Mac reports.

At the heart of it lies OpenAI’s chief hardware officer Tang Tan, who left his role as VP of Product Design at Apple in 2024 to work with Jony Ive, later joining OpenAI in the Io acquisition, and Chang Liu, who spent eight years at Apple as a Senior System Electrical Engineer before leaving for OpenAI in January.

The pair is accused of accessing confidential Apple systems and downloading «detailed information about unreleased products, engineering presentations, technical specifications, and proprietary project data,» The Verge reports.

The two have also been holding some interesting job interviews, Apple claims, where hires from Apple have been encouraged to lay out systems planning and to log into confidential systems and share trade secrets and restricted paperwork.

There are 400 ex-Apple employees at OpenAI, and the whole hardware business is «rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets,» the lawsuit alleges.

«We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,» OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri tells The Guardian.

Read more: The actual filing. More on 9to5Mac, The Verge, The Guardian, TechCrunch and Daring Fireball. Discussion on r/Singularity and Hacker News.

Apple says security updates must be more frequent due to AI hacking

AI accelerated hacking is changing how Apple deals with system patches. (Picture: generated)
After releasing a 26.5.2 update across its devices to fix over 25 bugs today, Apple said the fixes were originally intended for the next point release of their operating systems — the 26.6.

Concerns about AI-accelerated hacking tools made the company push up the updates sooner in a dedicated release, according to Reuters.

This is the new reality, they say, where the time to develop malware has been greatly reduced by AI — and the time window for fixing bugs has likewise decreased.

Apple did not say if any of the vulnerabilities they rectified in the latest release had been exploited in the wild yet, which used to be the criteria for a rapid response.

The company is one of the «trusted partners» on Project Glasswing, and enjoys access to Anthropic’s Mythos Preview model to probe and detect flaws in their software, MacRumors notes, but it is not known if Mythos was used in this particular case.

Read more: Reuters, MacRumors, 9to5Mac.

OpenAI’s new hardware device is a shortcut keypad for Codex

The Codex keypad looks like an iteration of an existing product, not something entirely new. (Picture: OpenAI)
The OpenAI Developers account on X teased a video of a square device with backlit keys made in collaboration with Work Louder, along with the date July 15th.

It’s likely a small keypad for common Codex shortcuts, as mentioned by the post, and it will be the first hardware device (co-)developed by OpenAI. Not a flashy new phone or the highly anticipated AI hardware device, which would take years to develop.

Work Louder is mostly famous for mechanical keyboards and custom keypads, and makes a $144 13-key wireless pad, complete with a tiny joystick.

The device being teased in the video looks like a carbon copy of the Creator Micro 2 pad described above, save for the backlit keys.

That should offer a hint for how OpenAI will be playing its hardware — as a premium Codex add-on, likely also with a premium price.

Read more: The X post, The Verge, 9to5Mac.

OpenAI delivers Jalapeño, a state-of-the-art chip made in only nine months

The Jalapeño chip offers substantially better performance per watt than anything on the market. (Picture: OpenAI)
The new inference chip, developed with help from OpenAI’s models in collaboration with Broadcom, has compressed what is normally a glacial, years-long process into just a short sprint.

— We believe [this] to be the fastest ASIC development cycle ever achieved in high-performance advanced semiconductors, OpenAI says.

The chip is designed specifically for OpenAI’s needs on current and upcoming language models, and to combine the power of current AI accelerators with the shorter latency of «specialized systems,» like Cerebras’ hardware.

— The world is moving to a compute-powered economy, says Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI. — Jalapeño is part of our long-term full-stack infrastructure strategy to make compute more abundant.

The new silicon will be deployed at gigawatt-scale data centers just as fast as it was made, starting with Microsoft «and other partners» already in 2026, Broadcom says. It is only the first design in what the companies expect to be generations of products.

Jalapeño is already running LLM workloads in the lab, delivering «substantially better» performance per watt than «the current state-of-the-art,» OpenAI says.

Read more: OpenAI’s presentation, CNBC, CNN, Reuters, and TechCrunch.

Nvidia launches Arm-based RTX Spark SoC for Windows-based AI computers

Nvidia promises a new paradigm in how we use computers, but offers little detail. (Picture: Nvidia)
Claiming a new era in PC processing power, the new system chip is custom-built for AI workflows and is «a New Beginning for Personal Computers,» Nvidia says.

According to Nvidia, people with the RTX Spark installed can simply talk to their computer to get stuff done. A designer can get AI to evolve their sketch all the way to a finished 3D model and a movie with Adobe tools with agents doing all the lifting, for example, The Verge reports.

Continue reading “Nvidia launches Arm-based RTX Spark SoC for Windows-based AI computers”

OpenAI is building a «fundamentally changing» agent-first phone, Kuo says

This is how Ming-Chi Kuo imagines a new agent-first interface. (Picture: Ming-Chi Kuo)
Supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, mostly known for breaking early Apple news, has published an article on x.com claiming that OpenAI is already working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop a phone with an agentic interface.

— Smartphones will remain the largest-scale device category for the foreseeable future, he writes, and shipments of high-end phones are around 300-400 million units a year — a mass market OpenAI would be keen on reaching.

The phone itself should be an agent-first experience, «fundamentally changing how people think of smartphones,» Kuo says.

This means moving away from apps to agents, from icons to tasks, and then doing away with the well-worn grid interface in favor of an agent-powered stream layout.

Along with the chip giants on board, systems integrator Luxshare is slated as their main manufacturing partner, aiming for a full system spec late this year or early 2027. Mass production is «expected» in 2028, meaning the project is moving fast.

Read the full story on x.com.

Arm releases its first physical silicon chip, the AGI CPU, for agentic inference

Arm says agent workflows are set to rise four times, and their new CPU is tailor made for the process. (Picture: Arm)
Precisely catching the fastest growing trend in AI computing, Arm says its new CPU is tailor made for agent workloads.

Co-developed with Meta, the chip is claimed to deliver twice the performance per rack compared to x86 platforms.

Agentic AI compute is expected to require more than four times the current capacity per gigawatt in data centers, and both Arm and Meta expect the design to iterate across several generations.

The AGI CPU is projected to lift Arm’s revenue by «billions» of dollars, Reuters reports, and has over fifty launch partners, including OpenAI, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and Meta.

Read more: Arm presser, Meta presser, product page, Reuters, and The Verge.

Nvidia will sell $1 trillion of its AI chips by 2027, launches inference rack

The Groq 3 LPU has only 500 MB of memory, but it’s SRAM flying at 150 TB/s. (Picture: Nvidia)
The Blackwell and Rubin series of chips are selling like hotcakes, the Nvidia CEO says at the Games Developer Conference, as he doubles the previous guidance of $500 billion in sales and justifies a market valuation topping $4 trillion.

Huang’s most interesting offering at the show was the new Groq 3 LPX, a custom rack made for inference loads.

Continue reading “Nvidia will sell $1 trillion of its AI chips by 2027, launches inference rack”

Meta announces new processor generation focused on inference

Meta’s MTIA-chips are supposed to support recommendations and AI for «billions» of people. (Picture: Meta)
Tapping their long-time partner Broadcom, Meta’s new in-house chips are built to scale from recommendation engines to advanced AI workflows.

The new generation Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) isn’t built to replace the chips sourced from AMD or Nvidia, but are intended to supplement them and achieve «the lowest possible price.»

MTIA-chips are taking a different tack on developing AI models, optimizing for inference — the process of answering AI queries — instead of training. Most chips are customized for training, which is more compute intensive, but the majority of a chip’s life is spent putting together answers in production.

— Chip designs are based on projected workloads, but by the time the hardware reaches production — often two years later — those workloads may have shifted substantially, Meta says in their press release.

The new chips «have either already been deployed or are scheduled for deployment in 2026 or 2027,» Meta says — and they don’t disclose just how many of these they are making.

Read more: Meta’s press release. Writeups on Reuters and CNBC.

OpenAI’s first device will reportedly be a pocket-sized AI speaker, due in 2027

Does the world really need another smart speaker? Ive and Altman certainly think so. (Picture: screenshot)
After buying former Chief Apple Designer Jony Ive’s Io design lab in May, 2025, Altman and Ive have been teasing a breakthrough hardware device said to be something to take a bite of — and speculation has abounded.

Now The Information (paywalled) is citing sources from an all hands meeting at OpenAI touting an early prototype of a smart speaker.

Continue reading “OpenAI’s first device will reportedly be a pocket-sized AI speaker, due in 2027”

ByteDance is developing in-house AI chips, to be manufactured by Samsung

Nvidia chips are available in China, but users need permission to buy them. (Picture: Adobe)
Not much is known about the AI inference chips, or how they compare to Nvidia’s offerings, but ByteDance is going to be making about 100,000 of them «this year,» and then scale up to 350,000 units, according to Reuters.

ByteDance has been known to work with US chip producer Broadcom, and started seriously hiring chip specialists in 2022.

The new chips are set to be produced with Samsung in a deal that includes memory chips, which definitely sweetens the deal.

Production is advanced enough that Reuters’ sources say engineering samples are due by late March, which is the last stage before production.

A spokesperson for the company does not deny the report outright, but claims the information is «inaccurate,» Reuters writes.

Most US frontier labs are developing their own chips, as is Alibaba and Baidu.

Read the scoop at Reuters.

Apple is doing early work on an AirTag-sized AI pin, set for 2027

Apple’s slightly bigger AirTag will be an AI interface, rumors imply. (Picture: Apple)
Apple plans to compete in the AI pin race against OpenAI’s upcoming device said to upend the smartphone/assistant market.

The device in early stage planning will be similar to a slightly thicker AirTag, paywalled The Information writes.

It will be thin, flat and circular, come with an aluminum shell and offer two cameras on the front to observe it’s surroundings and take pictures. It will also have a three microphone array for listening in — and an included speaker for output, writes MacRumors.

There is only one button on it, presumably for turning it on and off.

The presumptive idea for such a pin would be for use with an AI assistant without having to spring out a full feature phone just to check the surroundings — and it will probably work along with a phone in the Apple ecosystem.

The finished system could be able to launch as early as 2027, and Apple plans to produce around 20 million devices at launch, Engadget writes.

There is not much time to act; OpenAI said yesterday that their first device will be ready in late 2026.

Read more: The Verge, Engadget, MacRumors.

Google demos smart glasses with Android XR, set to debut in 2026

The glasses without a screen will arrive first, as of "next year."
Google’s in-specs screen is impressing reviewers, but it’s the screenless glasses getting released first. (Picture: Google)
Google has officially taken the lid off «Project Aura,» inviting a whole host of websites to demo it — and doing their own bit in The Android Show, XR Edition on Youtube.

They are mostly concerned with the glasses with internal screens, that can run bog standard Android apps as well as Android XR apps — and provides you with information right inside the glasses.

These spectacles, while impressive, connect via wire to a puck in your pocket that serves as a battery and trackpad in one, and use a phone or laptop for computing power, but they don’t have a release date as of yet.

Continue reading “Google demos smart glasses with Android XR, set to debut in 2026”

Nvidia gets all clear from Trump Commerce to sell H200 chip in China

Nvidia gets approval to ship powerful H200 chips to China.
Nvidia’s more powerful H200 chips can now be sold in China. (Picture: Nvidia)
The powerful chip can be sold to vetted partners with a tax of 25% to the U.S. government, Trump said in a statement.

Nvidia’s H200 is a much more advanced chip than the custom H20 that the company was allowed to export to China earlier, with the newer Blackwell chips being only about 1.5 times faster, Reuters notes.

The H20 chips were recently banned in China, where the authorities instead opted for Huawei chips for data center supplies.

Continue reading “Nvidia gets all clear from Trump Commerce to sell H200 chip in China”