The ChatGPT Phone Is Not What You Expect - EGOPOLY
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The ChatGPT Phone Is Not What You Expect
2026-08-10
It’s been widely reported that OpenAI is working on a consumer<br>electronics product. Most of the recent commentary has been about a<br>portable smart speaker, sort of like an Amazon Echo but with a<br>battery. It makes sense, if you think about what the service called<br>ChatGPT is today. It’s an AI model that you can talk to. I don’t know<br>how many people like talking to ChatGPT by voice rather than<br>typing. But certainly a lot of people like to do that.
Talking to an ambient computer program is very sci-fi and is useful<br>in some cases. I’m sure there are people who will even use this mode<br>for complex chatbot projects like making a web site or app. But that<br>gets awkward if you want to see your work: you really need a screen to<br>see the web site you are making. And probably tapping your finger on<br>some kind of input is going to be way better than talking out loud in<br>many situations.
Look, this web site in particular has a long and proud tradition of<br>making incredibly wrong speculation. So I’m not going to stop now.
The smart phone is the most important consumer technology product ever<br>created, and probably will remain so until biological implants of some<br>kind are safe and widely adopted. So probably forever!
A smart phone is only called a phone by the happenstance of how it had<br>to go to market. It’s really a tiny computer, really the first and<br>best truly personal computer. It has a screen, touch input,<br>microphones, speakers and cameras. The only thing it doesn’t have is a<br>smell sensor! With that input and output, you can do just about<br>anything a person would need with software. You just need to write the<br>software!
Apple and Google control the smart phone ecosystem with their<br>operating systems. They decide how all other software is allowed to<br>interact with the user and the world. They decide that software from<br>third parties lives in things called “apps,” and what the rules are<br>for waking up to bother the user. Controlling a platform is a great<br>business! It gives both companies both a strong source of revenue and<br>a moat that can be used to thwart competition that could usurp their<br>control.
So companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are on the leading edge of an<br>incredibly useful technology. The investment they have taken suggests<br>that they want to be the platforms for the next phase of<br>technology. But if Apple and Google control the computer in everyone’s<br>pockets, how can they ever become a platform? To be a platform, they<br>have to be the gatekeeper for everything, and the incumbents aren’t<br>going to give that up.
It’s clear today that Apple and Google preference their own AI<br>models over those of any third party. In the case of Apple, their new<br>model that is coming this fall actually is mostly based on Google’s<br>Gemini AI model.
So OpenAI is going to make a smart phone. Of course they are. They<br>aren’t trying to hire every industrial designer and hardware engineer<br>from Apple so they can make a smart speaker. Come on. My most<br>charitable reading of the OpenAI donut-shaped portable chat speaker is<br>that they need to create the institutional structure to ship a<br>consumer hardware device. So it might as well be something they can<br>slap together quickly.
But making a smart phone is stupid, isn’t it? Amazon tried it, it was<br>a spectacular flop. Facebook tried it, but it never even<br>launched. Neither of those efforts had anything compelling to<br>offer. Why would anyone want a smart phone that was, uh, super good at<br>shopping, I guess, and basically the same as an iPhone or Android phone<br>in every other way?
Won’t OpenAI have the cold start problem? There’s so much you’d have<br>to build to make a phone that did what people need their iPhone<br>for. The essential functionality of messaging and communications, a<br>web browser, sure, that’s a lot of work but you could build<br>it. Especially if your software team is all using AI to build it. But<br>then you have to get all the other apps in the world, more or less,<br>to build for your new platform. And then what do you have? You just<br>have a device that is identical to an iPhone or Android in almost<br>every way. You’re not going to win in the market with that.
So here’s where I get into wild speculation. OpenAI (and Anthropic<br>too) are not trying to make a super intelligent chatbot. OpenAI kind of<br>stumbled into a massively successful product by making a chatbot, of<br>course! But that’s not the goal. The point is to take software to a<br>place it has never been, to get to a level that is as far beyond<br>apps-in-a-grid as apps-in-a-grid is beyond green text on a terminal.
OpenAI should build a phone that is made for the AI of 5 years from<br>now, not the chatbots of today. I think...