ChatGPT’s first hardware may look familiar

When the news first broke that legendary Apple designer John Ive was joining forces with OpenAI on the first made-for-ChatGPT hardware, imaginations ran wild. 

What could the first ChatGPT hardware be? Not anything with a screen, insiders said (Ive and ChatGPT founder Sam Altman have remained mostly mum on the subject.) Maybe more a “pebble” that would fit in your pocket, a “third-core” device that would be “contextually aware” of its surroundings. 

Indeed, reports of a leaked OpenAI conference call detailed Altman calling the device the “coolest piece of technology that the world will have even seen,” while Ive has called the upcoming ChatGPT hardware the beginning of a “new design movement.” 

Well, a groundbreaking ChatGPT hardware device may yet be in the pipeline, but a new report says one of the first ChatGPT devices will be far more familiar: a plain-old smart speaker. 

The speaker, which might not arrive until February 2027, would ship with a camera and cost between $200 and $300, according to the Information and its anonymous sources.  

Other OpenAI hardware in the works include smart glasses and—maybe—a smart lamp, the report said, with the glasses not expected to be released until 2028 or later. 

OpenAI has yet to comment on The Information’s story, and like any report from anonymous industry sources, it should be taken with a grain of salt. 

But if we are just getting a glorified, ChatGPT-powered Echo speaker as our first OpenAI product, it will be quite a letdown. I already have an AI-powered smart display in my kitchen—the Google Nest Hub Max with Gemini inside—and it mostly just sits there, displaying family photos, while the Alexa+-enabled Echo Dot in my office stays mostly silent.

Personally, I haven’t found many inspiring uses for AI in a smart speaker, and the same goes for ChatGPT’s voice mode and Gemini Live on a phone; the conversations tend to be stilted, halting, or downright weird. ChatGPT has done a lot for me on a desktop, but in a smart speaker? I’m not so sure. 

The rumored ChatGPT smart glasses would be a little closer to the vision of an on-the-body device that gathers intel from your surroundings, but OpenAI would be heading into well-trod territory (hello, Meta, and possibly even Apple). 

A ChatGPT smart lamp? That’s a little more out of the box, and we have seen similar smart lights with integrated smart speakers before.  

Personally, I’ll be waiting for the ChatGPT pebble.