{"id":461125,"date":"2026-02-11T00:25:10","date_gmt":"2026-02-11T00:25:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/461125\/"},"modified":"2026-02-11T00:25:10","modified_gmt":"2026-02-11T00:25:10","slug":"sam-altman-and-jony-ives-ai-gadget-just-hit-another-eyebrow-raising-roadblock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/461125\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s AI Gadget Just Hit Another Eyebrow-Raising Roadblock"},"content":{"rendered":"

Looks like Sam Altman and Jony Ive will have to wait until next year to kill AirPods<\/a>, or the iPhone<\/a>, or revolutionize the pen<\/a>, or whatever it is they\u2019re actually doing with their AI-centric hardware venture.<\/p>\n

According to a report from Wired<\/a>, court filings indicate that Sam Altman and Jony Ive have hit yet another snag in their nascent journey into AI gadgets<\/a> with a newly formed company, io. The first snag is that, well, they may not really be able to call the company \u201cio\u201d at all. Per Wired:<\/p>\n

\u201cPeter Welinder, OpenAI\u2019s vice president and general manager, said in the filing that OpenAI had reviewed its product-naming strategy and decided not to use the name \u2018io\u2019\u2026in connection with the naming, advertising, marketing, or sale of any artificial intelligence-enabled hardware products.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cDecided\u201d is an interesting choice of words here, given that the company was actually sued<\/a> and issued a court order in June over a trademark claim regarding the use of that name. What OpenAI \u201cdecided\u201d exactly is unclear, but from the outside, it looks like the decision was not theirs. It\u2019s also unclear what name they\u2019ll go with now, but maybe they could try \u201cPear,\u201d or \u201cGrape,\u201d or some other one-word fruit, since last I checked, \u201cApple\u201d was already taken. Wouldn\u2019t want to repeat that mistake twice.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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\u2019s a bit further out than we had anticipated. According to Wired, Sam Altman and Jony Ive\u2019s now nameless company will not start shipping its first gadget until February of 2027. The Information<\/a> and Axios<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

I say \u201cmight\u201d because it\u2019s really hard to tell just how far along any of this stuff is. Reports last year of difficulties getting devices to do basic stuff<\/a> aren\u2019t instilling much confidence. According to a report from the Financial Times<\/a>, 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\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t 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<\/a> or Rabbit and the increasingly irrelevant R1.<\/a><\/p>\n

The problem isn\u2019t even that those devices didn\u2019t take off; it\u2019s that they seemingly didn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Looks like Sam Altman and Jony Ive will have to wait until next year to kill AirPods, or…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":405193,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,60821,1283,7047,74],"class_list":{"0":"post-461125","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-jony-ive","12":"tag-openai","13":"tag-sam-altman","14":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=461125"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461125\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/405193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=461125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=461125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=461125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}