Final Friday, AI startup OpenAI filed a new application to trademark products related to its model — “OpenAI” — with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO). Usually, this wouldn’t be newsworthy. Corporations file for emblems on a regular basis. However within the utility, OpenAI hints at new product traces each nearer-term and of a extra speculative nature.
For instance, the submitting lists {hardware} together with headphones, goggles, glasses, remotes, laptop computer and cellphone circumstances, smartwatches, sensible jewellery, and digital and augmented actuality headsets “for AI-assisted interplay, simulation, and coaching.”
OpenAI last year confirmed that it was working with former Apple designer Jony Ive on a {hardware} undertaking, and the startup’s CEO, Sam Altman, on Sunday told Korean outlet The Elect that OpenAI hopes to develop AI-powered client {hardware} “via partnerships with a number of firms.” However in that very same interview, Altman cautioned that it’d take “a number of years” to finish even a prototype AI system.
OpenAI’s trademark utility additionally mentions robots — particularly “user-programmable humanoid robots” and “humanoid robots having communication and studying capabilities for aiding and entertaining folks.”
OpenAI lately started hiring for a brand new robotics group led by Caitlin Kalinowski, who joined the startup to steer {hardware} final November from Meta’s AR glasses division. According to job listings and reporting from The Information, OpenAI is seeking to check robots — presumably humanoid in type — powered by customized sensors and AI that may function with human-like intelligence in real-world settings.
Additional down in its submitting, OpenAI makes references to customized AI chips and providers for “leveraging quantum computing sources to optimize AI mannequin efficiency.”
It’s lengthy been rumored that OpenAI is creating customized chips to run its AI fashions. The corporate has a division focused on co-designing chip components, and reports suggest OpenAI goals to convey a customized chip to market with semiconductor producers Broadcom and TSMC as early as 2026.
OpenAI’s plans for quantum computing — assuming it has any set in stone — are murkier. However final 12 months, the startup added to its technical group a former quantum techniques architect at quantum computing startup PsiQuantum.
As The Register noted in a piece from March, quantum computing has the potential to drastically enhance the effectivity of coaching AI fashions due to its potential to carry out huge numbers of calculations concurrently. With the computing prices of AI displaying no indicators of coming down anytime quickly, maybe OpenAI sees a future in coaching fashions on {hardware} far architecturally completely different than the machines on which it depends right now.
Then once more, trademark functions are sometimes deliberately written to be broad and never essentially indicative of an organization’s product roadmap. OpenAI’s could properly reveal domains the startup is exploring — or at the very least, has thought-about exploring. However precisely when — or whether or not — any of the tech talked about within the submitting makes it to market is anybody’s guess.
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