OpenAI and Jony Ive’s AI super-gadget

Here’s what we know: it’s probably not smart glasses. Beyond that, we don’t know much about what Jony Ive and OpenAI are building through their newly combined company io, except that it’s some kind of AI super-gadget. But after a couple of years of watching the industry try and shove AI into every form factor you can imagine, we have some guesses.

On this episode of The Vergecast, Nilay and David are joined by The Verge’s Alex Heath to talk through all the things we know, kind of know, and don’t know at all about what io is up to. There’s some interesting reporting on the notion of the device as a companion to your phone and laptop, some connections to the original iPod Shuffle, and still a lot of questions about how this will work and whether you’ll want it. We won’t see this device for a while, but don’t worry — we’ll surely keep talking about it.

After that, the hosts run down all the news from Google I/O, which both Alex and Nilay attended in person. We talk about Google’s wildly ambitious and wildly confusing set of AI products, the ways Gemini and Search are encroaching on one another, and what this all means for the future of the web. It was an impressive, confident developer conference for Google, and the AI race appears hotter than ever.

Finally, in the lightning round, it’s time for another edition of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, because, well, you know the reason. We also talk about some breaking smart glasses news from Apple, and Alex’s experience with the Android XR prototypes at I/O. It seems like everybody except OpenAI is betting on smart glasses. We’ll see who’s right.

If you want to know more about everything we discuss in this episode, here are some links to get you started, first on io:

And on I/O:

And in Microsoft Build / web news:

And in the lightning round: