On Monday, Chris Lehane, OpenAI’s chief global affairs officer, said his company is “on track” to present its famously mysterious thingamajig to the public by the end of the year according to Axios. This would mean the previously rumored release date, September-ish, was not crazy after all.
Lahane’s announcement came during an event at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. However, Lahane did not provide any details about what this thing is or does. He also, according to Axios, said what he had described was the “most likely” release schedule, but that “we will see how things advance.”
For details about what the device is and does, you’ll have to read the aforementioned rumors from the China-based leaks account Smart Pikachu. That user posted a week ago that OpenAI is supposedly gunning for the market niche currently occupied by AirPods.
Smart Pikachu described manufacturing giant Foxconn working on something with the codename “Sweetpea,” a “special audio product” within a company project called “Gumdrop,” vaguely in the earbud or “open-ear headphones” zone. It would be two objects—one for each ear—and a little egg-shaped, dental-floss-holder-sized charging dock. Sweetpea would pack heavy duty processing power via a 2-nanometer, smartphone-style chip. Its release might also be followed, or accompanied, by four other “Gumdrop” devices between now and 2028, like a “home-style device,” and, um, a pen, according to Smart Pikachu. And once again: these are just unconfirmed rumors at this point.
But you’ll recall that the vast majority of the actual information OpenAI has given the world so far about its first device comes from two