In This Article:
OpenAI's (OPAI.PVT) recent hiring spree, including hires of former CEOs of Nextdoor (KIND) and Instacart (CART), signals serious hardware ambitions, capped by OpenAI's deal with Jony Ive.
Creative Strategies CEO and principal analyst Ben Bajarin joins Market Domination to explain that we could see artificial intelligence (AI)–powered wearables hit the market within 12 to 24 months as the space heats up.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Market Domination here.
When we look at the moves that OpenAI has been making recently, they've been hiring, uh, sort of on a bit of a hiring blitz, right? They hired the next door CEO as their CFO last year. They recently hired an Instacart, uh, the Instacart CEO as, I believe, their chief product officer. Now there's the Johnny Ive move. But what does all of this I mean, it still takes a while to make hardware, right? It's not like it's like they snap, they've hired him and that's it. What kind of timeline can we perhaps look for for something like this?
Yeah, I mean, it really, you're totally right. It takes a lot of time. And just look again, right, at how long Meta had been doing hardware, right? To get to a point where we saw some tipping curves of mass adoption, right? The the glasses had been in in works for a long time before they made it to market. It was really the second generation of Meta Ray-Bans that moved to any kind of reasonable scale with those now having sold over, you know, over two, two million units. So there there is a lot of time that goes into this. What we don't know is how far along OpenAI is already with prior concepts, you know, if they've been trial and erroring in this for a while, and they're and they're closer than we know because of what they got hardware wise, then obviously bringing, you know, more of these assets to the team can put them on a shorter timeline. I I don't think they're starting from scratch where it would be longer. But I also think we got to look at the timeline for, you know, again, just let's look at what Google's, you know, showed yesterday with these kind of AI first classes, whether they have a display or not, right? Like like the Ray-Bans that don't have a display or or some of the others that are being floated with a display. We're on the cusp of of those starting to take off, fueled by your ability to talk to an AI agent, explore the world, let it see what you see and have those interactions. That's that's the 12 to 18 month journey that we're on. You're going to see a whole host of those whether OpenAI is in that or not. But I would say over the next two years, this space is going to heat up quickly, and we're going to see hardware innovation again with this AI first, you know, sort of wearables hardware.
Really interesting stuff, Ben. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the coming months as we get more news on this. Appreciate it.
Yeah, thanks for having me.
