sam altman, Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs

(Emerson Collective/YouTube)

Altman: OpenAI’s AI gadget now has a prototype

Don’t get too excited — the actual product could be nearly two years away.

11/24/25 12:17PM

Remember the mysterious AI gadget that OpenAI is cooking up in its labs under the direction of former Apple design guru Jony Ive? According to CEO Sam Altman, the product is now in the prototype phase, and he vaguely disclosed some of the details.

At the Emerson Collective’s Demo Day conference with Steve Jobs’ widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, sitting alongside Jony Ive, Altman reflected on the progress the company has made since buying Ive’s company.

On the unusual partnership between himself and Ive, Altman said:

“...finally, we have the first prototypes. I can’t believe how jaw-droppingly good the work is and how exciting it is, but also now getting to have like — the benefit of hindsight and looking at the progress, the process backwards, how much it’s all in there and how it wouldn’t have worked any other way.”

When Jobs pushed on the pair to reveal some detail about the gadget, Altman said:

“An early thing we talked about with the devices we hope to build is if you have this really smart AI that you trust to do things for you over long periods of time, filter things out. Be able to be contextually aware of when it should not only not really bother you, but when it should present information to you or ask for your input or not.”

Altman said he and Ive agreed that today’s devices offer so many stimuli that it can be overwhelming for users, so they are trying to move past that:

“You trust it over time. And when it does have just this incredible contextual awareness of your whole life, you can then go for a vibe that is not like, you know, walking through Times Square and getting bumped into and having all this stuff compete for your attention, but like sitting in the most beautiful cabin by a lake and in the mountains and sort of just enjoying the peace and calm.”

In the only vague reference to the form of the gadget, Altman said:

“And there was an earlier prototype that we were like, quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of like, I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out of it. And then finally we got there all of a sudden, yeah.”

The product is expected to be ready in less than two years.

Rani Molla8h

Amazon raises the price for ad-free Prime Video to $4.99

Amazon is giving consumers more — for more. The e-commerce giant is raising the price of its ad-free Prime Video tier to $4.99 a month, up from $2.99.

On April 10, the service, now rebranded as Prime Video Ultra, will allow more concurrent streams (five instead of three) and up to 100 downloads, up from 25. Ad-free Prime Video had been included with a Prime membership until 2024, when Amazon added ads and began charging $2.99 a month to remove them.

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Prime Video’s Ad Free subscription becomes Prime Video Ultra for $4.99 a month

For what it’s worth, ad-free Prime Video is still cheaper than the other increasingly expensive streaming services — if you don’t include the cost of Prime.

Jon Keegan

10h

Most Americans have heard about data centers — the more they learn, the more negative their views

A major survey by Pew gives us a good look at how Americans are thinking about data centers as they start popping up in communities across the US.

Rani Molla11h

Uber relaunches robotaxi service with Hyundai-backed Motional in Las Vegas

What happens in Vegas, keeps happening in Vegas.

Uber users in Las Vegas can now be matched with an electric Motional IONIQ 5 robotaxi along parts of the Strip and at select casinos, resorts, and the Town Square shopping district near the airport, the companies said. For now, each vehicle includes a human safety operator monitoring from behind the wheel, who the companies say will be removed by year’s end.

Uber and Hyundai-backed autonomous tech company Motional previously tested a service there in 2022. “Motional is ready to put our extensive ride hail experience to work with Uber again,” said David Carroll, vice president of commercialization at Motional, which paused its commercial deployments in 2024 to refocus on its core driverless technology after scaling back operations.

This time around, the companies will be joining a much more crowded field. Amazon-owned Zoox has been offering free rides along select destinations on the Strip since last year, and both Tesla’s Robotaxi and Alphabet-owned Waymo have plans to open up shop there in the near future.

Thanks to a spate of recent AV partnerships, Uber, which sold its own autonomous unit back in 2020, is finding itself at the center of the nascent robotaxi boom.

Rani Molla12h

Musk says “xAI was not built right” amid executive departures, Cursor hires

There’s been a lot of turnover lately at xAI, with numerous executive departures and, yesterday, news that the SpaceX-owned company was hiring two senior leaders from Cursor, an AI coding startup that’s raising funds at a $50 billion valuation.

The reason? “xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” CEO Elon Musk posted on xAI-owned X yesterday, in response to a post about the Cursor hires. Earlier this month, Musk told a conference audience, “Grok is currently behind on coding.”

The news amounts to an admission of a reset inside xAI and an acknowledgment that the company is trailing AI peers like Anthropic and OpenAI in one of AI’s most commercially important applications: coding.

xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up.

Same thing happened with Tesla.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 12, 2026

Jon Keegan12h

War in the Middle East halts Meta’s undersea fiber project

Meta’s massive undersea cable project connecting Africa and the Middle East to Europe has run into an unexpected obstacle — not under the sea, but in the sky and land above: the war in the Middle East.

According to a report from Bloomberg, France’s Alcatel Submarine Networks, the company that is laying the cable, notified customers that it can no longer safely operate in the area.

The 2Africa project consists of a 45,000-kilometer chain of undersea fiber-optic cables that encircles Africa and runs through the Red Sea, up through the Gulf of Oman, where the Strait of Hormuz sits. Iran has declared the strait — a crucial choke point for oil and natural gas tankers — closed for traffic.

Meta is building the network in partnership with Bayobab, China Mobile, Orange, Telecom Egypt, Vodafone, WIOCC, and Center3.

Big Tech’s most important infrastructure is at the bottom of the sea