They can’t stop messing each other
How Well Do Google and Apple Become the Next Generation of Wearable AR Glasses? Is Google Higgsiable in 2026?
I spent about five minutes wearing the reference design prototype of Google’s new smart glasses. They had a small, low-res waveguide in the center of each lens that showed voice interactions with Gemini, a basic version of Google Maps directions, and photos I took. They were fine? Google knows this tech is super early and that full AR glasses are still years away. I expect that they will partner with more than one company to make glasses that will have the latest version of the mobile operating system. With Apple now planning a similar pair of AI-powered glasses in 2026, Meta’s window of being the only major player in the space is closing.
The AI Pin: An Always-Listening, Smart Body Cam for the Next Generation of Artificial Intelligence Hardware and its Implications for User Experiences
That leads me to believe we’re talking about something that’s a mix between the Plaud NotePin and the AI Pin. Plaud’s device can be worn in various ways, including as a necklace, is pill-shaped, and gives off a sleek, compact vibe. Meanwhile, the Humane AI Pin had a camera, speaker, microphone, and the Apple-esque elegance in terms of design. Even if it violated almost every principle of good product design, it had to pay an expensive subscription to the internet. In some ways, that means we’re kind of talking about an always-listening, smart body cam (that could also be a decorative item on your desk).
To make multimodal AI work, you need ingredients like a device that can see what you see, access a large language model, be with you wherever you go, and last long enough to be useful in a variety of scenarios. Given these parameters, it’s no surprise that Big Tech has largely landed on wearable gadgets, particularly glasses and pins. The thing most players in this space can’t agree on is whether the average person will want a display. So far, Ive and Altman don’t think so.
Right now, we’ve entered what I’d call the spaghetti phase of AI hardware. Smaller and bigger tech companies are throwing things at the wall to see what sticks. Silicon Valley would like your devices to have generative artificial intelligence. It’s just that no one agrees on what’s the best approach, or what people would actually pay for and use. While it is similar to the board game Clue, we are trying to guess who is going to crack the code in terms of form factor, company and use cases. Is it Samsung with Project Moohan in your living room as you ask Gemini to take you to Tokyo? Meta with its Ray-Ban glasses on a Thai beach as its Live AI feature translates a drinks menu? Bee or Plaud in a boardroom, diligently summarizing action items from your meeting? Or maybe it’s Ive and Altman — with whatever this prototype will do in whatever scenarios we’re meant to use it.
Early prototypes of the device exist (Altman mentioned taking one home in his promo video with Ive). Altman told OpenAI employees this week that it will be able to sit on a desk or be carried around. It is thought that it will be roughly the size of an iPod and be worn like a necklace.
A senior reporter with 13 years of experience focuses on health tech and Wearables. She worked for both Gizmodo and PC Magazine prior to The Verge.
There were several interesting announcements at Build this week, including Elon Musk’s Grok model coming to Azure and Microsoft’s bet on how to evolve the plumbing of the web for AI agents. All of that was overshadowed by protestors who kept disrupting the company’s keynotes to protest the business it does with Israel. The situation has gotten so tense that Microsoft tried unsuccessfully to block the ability for employees to send internal emails with the words “Palestine,” “Gaza,” and “Genocide.”
The company held an event on Thursday in San Francisco to debut its Claude 4 models , which it claims are the world’s best for coding. With OpenAI, Google, and Meta all battling to win the interface layer of AI, Anthropic is positioning itself as the model arms dealer of choice. It was telling that Windsurf, which is in talks to sell to OpenAI, was seemingly intentionally left out of getting day-one access to the new models. If models are countries, then that is akin to a trade ban. What about the state of the industry when a lab says it wants to blackmail people, and then releases some models that it knows want to do so?
OpenAI vs. Google: What’s Happening after Jony Ive and Sam Altman Announced Love From the Io Division?
After meeting with Google employees up and down the org chart, I came away from I/O with the feeling that the company doesn’t see a catastrophe on the horizon like a lot of outsiders. There’s a recognition that the ability to buy out distribution for search on Apple devices is probably coming to a close, but Gemini is approaching 500 million monthly users.
OpenAI buying the “io” hardware division of Jony Ive’s design studio, LoveFrom, is a delightfully petty bit of SEO sabotage, though I’m told the name stands for “input output” and was decided a while ago. The news of Ive and Altman teaming up took the focus away from the strong showing from the search giant at the I/O. The dueling announcements say a lot about what are arguably the world’s two foremost AI companies: Google’s models may be technically superior and more widely deployed, but OpenAI is kicking everyone’s ass at capturing mindshare and buzz.
Importantly, Ive ended his consulting relationship with Apple in 2022, the year before he met Altman. Ive could not work on products that could compete with Apple because of the lucrative deal. This will be the first time that a voice-first artificial intelligence device will be announced by Ive and Altman.
The rough timeline that led up to this moment goes as follows: Altman and Ive met two years ago and decided to officially work on hardware together this time last year. The io division is at LoveFrom and is working with a group of OpenAI employees. Laurene Powell Jobs invested in the effort to make it a full-scale company after there were murmurs of hundreds of millions of dollars being raised. (The OpenAI startup fund, which is bizarrely not owned by OpenAI, also invested around this time.)
The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Sam Altman was rumored to try to upstage the show like he did in the past, and the reason was because OpenAI had an event the day before to showcase advanced voice mode.
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