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.

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Georgia lawmakers introduce data center construction moratorium amid statewide pushback

More and more communities across the US are wrestling with the pros and cons of having a data center come to town. Georgia has become a hotspot of resistance to the data centers planned by Big Tech, according to a new report from The Guardian. The Atlanta metro area led the nation in data center construction in 2024.

Georgia state representatives introduced legislation that would place a one-year moratorium on data center construction in the state. Ten Georgia municipalities have already passed local bans on data centers.

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

Georgia leads push to ban datacenters used to power America’s AI boom

Per the report, at least three other states have seen similar data center moratorium legislation introduced in the last week, including Maryland and Oklahoma.

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Tesla’s Robotaxi is way cheaper than Uber, Lyft, or Waymo — but you’ll have to wait a lot longer for one

New data from ride-share comparison app Obi shows how much cheaper and less available Tesla’s autonomous ride-share service is.

Self Driving Taxi Company Waymo Voluntarily Issues Software Recall Over Cars Not Stopping For School Buses

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Corning soars after striking deal to sell up to $6 billion in optical infrastructure to Meta

Glass company Corning is soaring in early trading after announcing a $6 billion deal with Meta to provide its data centers with fiber-optic cable products. Thanks to a string of big tech deals — including partnerships with Broadcom and Apple — Corning’s stock is up about 100% over the past year.

A 175-year-old glass manufacturer, Corning is known for its Gorilla Glass, used in smartphone and laptop screens. It was known in the past for its iconic blue cornflower CorningWare ceramics, a consumer cookware business it spun off in the 1990s.

In an interview, Corning CEO Wendell Weeks told CNBC that he thinks “next year the hyperscalers will be our biggest customers,” amid demand from tech giants including Google and Microsoft.

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Wedbush’s Dan Ives predicts Tesla FSD penetration will rise from 12% to above 50%, but doesn’t say how

Ahead of earnings Wednesday, a new note on Tesla from Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives argues the company is on the cusp of a Robotaxi-driven transformation, with Full Self-Driving penetration rising above 50% and autonomy unlocking as much as $1 trillion in value — putting Tesla on a path to a $2 trillion to $3 trillion market cap over the coming year.

The issue isn’t the optimism; it’s the absence of mechanics. FSD penetration across Tesla’s global fleet currently sits in the low teens. The note doesn’t explain how Tesla bridges that gap — whether through pricing changes, bundling, or a behavioral shift among mass-market buyers. Tesla is ending the option to buy FSD outright in favor of subscriptions, but that alone isn’t going to push adoption from roughly 12% to 50%.

Ives treats Tesla’s Robotaxi progress as inevitable rather than conditional. The removal of safety drivers in Austin — which for now is isolated to two or three vehicles and involves using an extra car to follow the Robotaxi — is framed as a tipping point. But there’s little discussion of scaling risks, regulation, real-world performance data, or actual demand. Ives only says President Trump will likely issue an executive order on autonomous rules and regulatory hurdles will effectively disappear — with the implication that FSD adoption would accelerate rapidly.

Even near-term fundamentals are stretched to support the narrative. Tesla didn’t beat Q4 delivery expectations, though Ives says it did, having previously cited whisper numbers rather than the analyst consensus. That claim is then used to clear the runway for a valuation argument focused almost entirely on future autonomy.

In the end, this is less an earnings preview note than a statement of belief: autonomy works; adoption follows; Tesla wins at scale.

That story may eventually prove right — but for now, it’s an assertion that outstrips the evidence.