Sam Altman and OpenAI have already had a big week, but they’re not done yet. As a reminder, OpenAI’s brand-new open-source ChatGPT models are out for anyone to install on their devices, and OpenAI gave the entire U.S. federal workforce access to ChatGPT for $1 per year per agency. That’s all before Thursday’s big GPT-5 event, a livestream that should tell us everything we need to know about the long-awaited upgrade.
With all that going on, Altman has been busier than usual on social media this week, teasing the major updates coming to ChatGPT products. The OpenAI CEO’s most mysterious teaser came on Tuesday, when Altman took to X to imply that an AI at least as powerful as GPT-5 will run on the first ChatGPT io device that’s expected to launch in late 2026.
“Someday soon something smarter than the smartest person you know will be running on a device in your pocket, helping you with whatever you want,” Altman said. “This is a very remarkable thing.”
How smart is GPT-5?
If you’ve been following the AI landscape over the past few years, you know that OpenAI has partnered with former Apple design guru Jony Ive to give ChatGPT a physical home. Altman’s teaser above concerns that mysterious product. We know it’s not a phone, and we know it’s not a pair of glasses. But how smart will this piece of ChatGPT hardware be? Will it be as capable as GPT-5 or smarter? We should know more about GPT-5’s abilities once the model is available, but Altman already teased in recent weeks that GPT-5 can perform certain tasks much better than a human.
“I was testing our new model, and I got a question. I got emailed a question that I didn’t quite understand. And I put it in the model, this is GPT-5, and it answered it perfectly,” Altman said during a podcast interview after a visit to Washington D.C. a few days ago. “And I really kind of sat back in my chair, and I was just like, ‘Oh man, here it is moment’ […] I felt like useless relative to the AI in this thing that I felt like I should have been able to do, and I couldn’t. It was really hard. But the AI just did it like that. It was a weird feeling.”
A few days before that, Altman posted this teaser on X: “”Woke up early on a Saturday to have a couple of hours to try using our new model for a little coding project,” Altman said. “Done in 5 minutes. It is very, very good. Not sure how I feel about it…” It’s likely that was the GPT-5 model Altman was teasing.
What can the ChatGPT device do?
The first ChatGPT io device has been teased more than once, with OpenAI acquiring Jony Ive’s io startup for $6.5 billion. Ive and his team of former Apple designers and engineers will create the ChatGPT device experience. Reports say the first ChatGPT product will be something you can place in your pocket or wear around your neck with a lanyard. Such a device will have cameras so it can see the world and understand your context, and microphones and speakers so it can communicate via voice with you.
Altman and Ive announced the ChatGPT io device in mid-May, confirming rumors that the two parties were working together on an AI hardware product. They didn’t detail the product Ive and his team had created, but Altman confirmed he had tested it. “Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I’ve been able to live with it, and I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen,” the CEO said.
Since GPT-5 is about to be the best and smartest publicly available AI model from ChatGPT, it makes sense to assume it’ll power the ChatGPT hardware experience. Other ChatGPT upgrades will surely follow by late 2026 when the device might be unveiled. Also, OpenAI is working on ambient computing AI experiences that will give the AI social skills it currently lacks. That’s likely being built atop GPT-5. I’d expect the io team to already have access to GPT-5 so it can fine-tune the hardware experience around the best AI model OpenAI has to offer.
