OpenAI's smartphone will fail, but it will be good for iPhone users

In recent days, AI companies have presented conflicting views about the future of smartphones. Perplexity believes that AI will only benefit iPhones, while OpenAI claims that its own smartphone could render them unnecessary.

I bet very confidently that OpenAI's smartphone will either never happen or will be a commercial failure, but I still think this initiative is good news for iPhone users...

Perplexity: AI will not disrupt the iPhone

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas does not think AI poses a threat to the iPhone; on the contrary, he argues the opposite.

Here’s my view. I haven’t said this before. The phone, the iPhone is actually not disrupted by AI at all. In fact, the better AI works, the iPhone essentially becomes your digital passport.

He states that the iPhone plays a central role in how we live our lives and that this will not change.

OpenAI smartphone

If Ming-Ching Kuo's report is correct, OpenAI does not agree with this claim. The company is said to be developing its own smartphone.

OpenAI is working with MediaTek and Qualcomm to develop smartphone processors, while Luxshare acts as the dedicated system design and manufacturing partner. Mass production is expected to start in 2028.

The company's concept is that the operating system is built around AI agents instead of applications. In other words, you will not open a specific application to accomplish a task; instead, you will delegate the task to an AI agent.

OpenAI will be partially right... eventually

In principle, I think OpenAI is right in believing that their people have tasks they want to accomplish and that applications are just a tool for this.

It would be great to take my iPhone, tell Siri what I want to do, and get confirmation that the task is completed within a few seconds or minutes. For example, telling Siri to make a travel reservation, because I know it knows all my preferences for airlines, seats, hotels, etc.; that it can apply my frequent flyer miles to the trip; that it has access to my calendar to ensure timings work, and much more.

I believe we will eventually get there, and when we do, the concept of human-accessible applications will become at least partially unnecessary. However, this will definitely not happen by 2028! Given the child errors that current AI systems make, it will take a long time for me to trust an agent for something significant, and never for something ambitious like travel plans.

Even when it eventually happens, it doesn’t mean we will give up our iPhones. The Apple ecosystem will become even more important in such an interconnected world, and the appeal of the iPhone maker's privacy approach will only increase.

But I hope it happens