Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s AI Gadget Just Hit Another Eyebrow-Raising Roadblock

Looks like Sam Altman and Jony Ive will have to wait until next year to kill AirPods, or the iPhone, or revolutionize the pen, or whatever it is they’re actually doing with their AI-centric hardware venture.

According to a report from Wired, court filings indicate that Sam Altman and Jony Ive have hit yet another snag in their nascent journey into AI gadgets with a newly formed company, io. The first snag is that, well, they may not really be able to call the company “io” at all. Per Wired:

“Peter Welinder, OpenAI’s vice president and general manager, said in the filing that OpenAI had reviewed its product-naming strategy and decided not to use the name ‘io’…in connection with the naming, advertising, marketing, or sale of any artificial intelligence-enabled hardware products.”

“Decided” is an interesting choice of words here, given that the company was actually sued and issued a court order in June over a trademark claim regarding the use of that name. What OpenAI “decided” exactly is unclear, but from the outside, it looks like the decision was not theirs. It’s also unclear what name they’ll go with now, but maybe they could try “Pear,” or “Grape,” or some other one-word fruit, since last I checked, “Apple” was already taken. Wouldn’t want to repeat that mistake twice.

That’s snag number one. Snag number two is that the company now has a new timeline for the release of its first piece of hardware, and it’s a bit further out than we had anticipated. According to Wired, Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s now nameless company will not start shipping its first gadget until February of 2027. The Information and Axios have reported that OpenAI could unveil its devices as soon as this year. As a result, the projected unveiling of the device by the second half of this year is now uncertain, though the company might still have something to show by then.

I say “might” because it’s really hard to tell just how far along any of this stuff is. Reports last year of difficulties getting devices to do basic stuff aren’t instilling much confidence. According to a report from the Financial Times, Sam Altman and Jony Ive are struggling to actually muster the computing power to enable their computer(s) to, um, compute. On top of that, they’re struggling to get their voice assistant (which apparently is supposed to be listening all the time) to function in a way that makes the device usable. One problem in particular has reportedly been getting the voice assistant to listen when you want it to and shut up when appropriate.

Listen, I get it; figuring anything new out is going to come with its own unique set of challenges, and some of those challenges aren’t going to be easily solvable overnight. The problem is that when you take a simple fact like that and place it in the context of AI gadgets, it becomes very easy to cast doubt on the whole idea. AI gadgets have had a rough go; just ask Humane and its fallen AI Pin or Rabbit and the increasingly irrelevant R1.

The problem isn’t even that those devices didn’t take off; it’s that they seemingly didn’t do half of what was promised. Maybe OpenAI can solve critical flaws with AI gadgets, but maybe the problem is that there are too many issues to solve. Could be that AI just isn’t smart enough yet, and neither are the voice assistants powered by it. Or maybe our general vice grip on phones as the end-all, be-all form factor is too strong for a device like Altman and Ive’s to pry open. No matter which way you spin it, the company formerly known as io has a lot to solve, and the problems just seem to keep piling up.