OpenAI buys smartphone camera maker Glass Imaging for $300M
techcrunch.com127 points by myth_drannon a day ago
127 points by myth_drannon a day ago
what an interesting acquisition. I was the one who wrote them up originally for TC: https://techcrunch.com/2022/03/22/glass-rethinks-the-smartph...
they had a really cool optical approach that I kind of felt immediately was doomed in the consumer market but would likely find a cool, valuable niche. The unique distortion patterns and front element I felt probably ruled out cinema but beyond that I had no idea. looks like they pivoted at some point but their expertise in lens accommodation does seem like it could be helpful.
Both Apple and Google have dropped the ball enough with the state of recent releases that some iPhone-equivalent-disruption product from the AI industry is becoming conceivable, though I would be surprised if it turns out not to be running Android in some form.
Putting a lot of effort into pushing complexity into software to reduce manufacturing complexity is precisely the sort of thing you worry about when you're getting serious about building consumer products.
> though I would be surprised if it turns out not to be running Android in some form.
Just yesterday I saw a post I cant recall if on here or reddit, someone coded an entire OS with Claude Code, I would not be surprised if they invest AI compute at building an OS themselves, though I'd never buy a phone from these companies.
The person got it running on bare hardware.
Found it:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1wfpydl/i_asked_c...
The issue is getting developers to create apps for a new OS nobody uses (yet). And nobody will use it if they can't have their banking app and uber on it
This becomes even tougher if they go the Apple route and don't allow other phone manufacturers to use their OS. Alternatively, if they go down the Windows Phone route, we saw how that played out considering that Google _pays_ manufacturers to use Android
Making OS is very hard, but getting necessary adoption is likely even harder
On the other hand, I'm perfectly fine with a high quality phone OS that has only stock apps out of the box and high quality hardware, good camera, good battery life, reasonable camera app, drastically more curated app store for professional apps, I'd be okay with such a competitor, no more ad spam apps.
I don't think I've seen a phone take over enterprise the way that the Blackberry once dominated, now its either iPhone or Android. You could argue that your executives are safer on a more locked down system. You'd 100% want to get everyone who makes an MFA app or service on your device on the other hand.
It's a bit of a different world today then when BlackBerry dominated.
RIM essentially invented MDM which is what allowed it to take off in the enterprise, via BlackBerry Enterprise Server. Android and iOS didn't fully unseat them in the enterprise until third party MDMs were up to par and lock down the consumer devices just as effectively.
So whatever new phone/OS that wants to take a stab at the enterprise, out of the gate, must support MDM profiles from all the major ones at least (InTune, ManageEngine, MaaS360, etc.). Then, as you said, all the MFA apps, at least should have Slack/Teams, office apps, etc.
Not that it can't be done, but the cost of entry is much higher today if anyone wants to overcome the switching costs.
The cost of entry is higher, but everyone has more money though, in this analogy. AI can vibe code all that out if someone seriously wanted to compete.
Not only that, people have seriously memory holed the state the original iPhone launched in.
No App Store, only web apps, not even 3G, only Yahoo push mail, and tied to AT&T - who were loathed, because in many places they just sucked. And it succeeded anyway.
It was when Exchange push support came in the first major OS upgrade that corporate adoption exploded.
I would be surprised if any AI forward OS is based around applications developed by other people. I imagine the OS will create the software you need. Thing's like banking apps are more difficult, but I imagine OpenAI could sort that out behind the scenes.
The idea of managing a consumer app API for which every client is auto-vibecoded to the user's preference sounds...fun.
User: Hello Uber support? Yes, the app shows my driver is in the ocean off the west coast of Africa? And his ETA is -2147483648 minutes?
Uber: Your app, your problem.
User: Hello phonebrain, can you fix my Uber app?
Phonebrain: You're absolutely right, I must have misunderstood the API docs. Squiggling... ... Shuffling ...
Phonebrain: Error, you've hit your usage limit. Please wait 12 hours, or switch to pay-as-you-go app development mode. I cannot estimate how much it will cost to fix your Uber app.
And if it came to that, and that's how this OS worked, we'd see open APIs disappear real quick from all the popular services because of the support nightmare, and, services like Uber and others are going to want to maintain exclusivity with their first party app the moment vibe coding becomes that viable. APIs will get locked down, and we'll all be worse off for it.
If an "AI Phone" looks to be an existential threat to third party app devs and services, except everyone to do everything they can kill said AI Phone to protect their own products.
Tech companies already have a history of shutting down APIs as soon as someone actually uses the API to make something that users like better than the official applications. They don't need AI-written clients as an excuse.
Why would they rate-limit fixing their own bugs? Seems counter-productive.
Who wants to vibe code all of their phone apps? Vibe coding is cheaper than traditional core, but it certainly isn’t free.
Obligatory RIP Windows Phone. I can't help but think about where it would have been today if they'd just stuck with it.
Honestly this might be less of a problem these days. If the model is that you build a good dev API and everyone points their agent at the software they need, then you don’t need the huge corporate investment in a full ecosystem.
To be clear I don’t think we are fully ready for this to work. But directionally the trend looks significant.
That's unfortunately a rosy view of it. It might be easier to take source from one platform to another but that was never the issue; the issue is keeping it up to date with releases, testing it as often as other platforms, and handling user support tickets. The chicken and egg situation still applies here and companies aren't going to spend all the time and money on a new platform if users aren't asking for it.
Every single thing you mentioned will be completely automated soon. 10 years max. Likely way less. That's my prediction at least.
Then it comes down to cost of compute. Are companies going to add a multiplier on their compute costs to reach a platform with no users? It's still the same problem.
Except that emulation/VM and the web makes it viable. What do you want to do with the thing? Banking and Uber are two specific, mass-market adoption criteria, but there's a reason Windows is still around and it's not because of those two things. The issue is business and money and who's paying for things in the age of AI? I'll use a new OS for fun, for free, in my spare time, but if I have to pay money instead of time, then I'm going to have to think about it. Either way though, the AI lab's gonna get my money in order to do stuff with it.
> someone coded an entire OS with Claude Code
I, as someone who would rather leave the industry than become a manager of either people or autonomous agents, or worse just a meat-based relay, am truly obsolete.
Do you want fries with that?
I think of this as a baker at the nascence of bread-baking factories.
Will you operate the bread baking machine, own a bread factory ($++) or make eco-handmade artisan bread ($--).
Or do something completely different? Trade railway shares?
Clearly the answer is to announce that the baking frontier must slow down. ;)
Bread baking factories could clearly destroy civilization as we know it, create incredible economic inequality, make a permanent underclass, etc etc.
I think you need to look beyond the job factor to see the real dangers of AI development.
I think baking bread at scale will give everyone gluten issues.
I am sure your fantasy could stretch further than that, if you allowed it to.
Android has a huge amount of battle tested stuff for running things like media codecs and GPUs connected to devices that are not rebooted for months on end by normal people. (The iPhone wasn't an entirely new OS either for a good reason).
The whole vibe coding an OS might become a thing in the next few years, but you still have to QA and test it, and there simply hasn't actually been enough time for that.
Why can’t agents QA it?
Hardware is hardware. At some point you have to run and test it on the real thing, and it always misbehaves in some previously undiscovered way.
A lot of software people live under the illusion that hardware bugs don't happen, but they're ubiquitous and it's the job of firmware and OS people to reduce their impact.
Edit: I should add anyone that's worked with me knows I strongly advocate offline fuzz testing of all software components, especially to deal with unexpected states coming from the hardware side. This has proven unreasonably effective, and absolutely is something agents can help with, but they won't solve the whole problem.
porting an OS to a known platform which has been done a tonne of times before is very different to trying to create a power efficient, secure and fast OS on hardware that is not yet locked down, let alone released.
Moreover the interaction between firmware and the OS is a massive headache to overcome, especially if you are dealing with battery powered devices.
I wonder why hasn’t the OP forked postmarketOS or some other Linux?
I totally get why they wanted a custom userland, built it myself for embedded devices. But IME Linux kernel is not terribly bad these days.
The time is ripening to disrupt Android/iOS. The place to start would be to rethink the device around AI. No need for apps or messy integrations with third-party crap. Just a simple device with a great new UX (not typing on a touchpad!) that is slick and does a few things very well (personal agent, coordinating with your personal knowledge base, handling external communications and your interface with the world). This could very easily supplant a phone.
AI is rapidly getting to such a place where the you don't really need a developer ecosystem to get your device off the ground. As "plugins" into your agent at some later point -- sure, why not.
You want a phone that "does a few things very well" and then you list "personal agent" and "your interface with the world". This would encompass everything anyone does with a phone, except maybe interacting with creative media (video games, ebooks). That's the exact opposite of "a few things". I think you're confusing actual functionality with AI marketing phrases.
The problem is that although what most people use on a daily basis is small nearly everyone uses something unusual app for _something_. I think it would be quite hard to find a market large enough that didn’t include such people.
There is a solution sitting there, which is running Android and having the AI run it behind the scenes I guess, but is suspect that would end up looking a lot like we have now.
This is the fundamental problem with all of these hypothetical new devices. If you assume you can come up with some new UI or innovative interaction model, maybe it’s purely voice or whatever else, then you have to ask if this could just run on a phone.
Modern smartphones won’t be supplanted by tech that could just run on a phone. That doesn’t make any sense. For any new tech to take off and replace phones, it has to provide something that isn’t simply additive to the phone. Otherwise, it just makes more sense to build it into the existing phone.
“A phone, but it has AI and no apps” isn’t even additive. It’s purely a loss of functionality.
> “A phone, but it has AI and no apps” isn’t even additive. It’s purely a loss of functionality.
I don't necessarily agree that “A phone, but it has AI and no apps” is a good product, but it could be considered additive.
When the iPhone came out, it was "a pocket computer, but without a physical keyboard and mouse" and some might have argued that it was subtractive because of that. Maybe we shouldn't be thinking about "apps" as something inherently required by any future device ever created.
The additive part on the iPhone was:
1. A screen that covers the whole device.
2. A device that doesn’t suck for touch.
The loss of the physical keyboard was indeed actually a loss, but was offset by meaningful improvements.
My problem with most of these proposed devices is that they are purely subtractive. I can run ChatGPT or Claude or whatever on my phone right now. Where is the part where a new type of device delivers some new experience or capability?
It doesn't sound like your product idea has WhatsApp so it's not going to supplant the phone of anyone I know.
i dont really use any apps on iphone. pretty sure ppl dont want instagram served on chatgpt dynamic ui
Be careful what you wish for, I can't imagine anything more dystopian than OpenAI owning all our devices.
God people like you are delusional and don’t understand what drives the behaviour of consumers to even prefer apple and its offerings.
OpenAI want to make smart glasses, but can't do that yet because its not possible.
So they are almost certianly making an alexa type thing with cameras. So they can build a device capable of recording the entire context of a household.
> but can't do that yet because its not possible.
Huh? Why not?
Because the central limitation is still mass; a friction-fit frame light enough to sit on your face all day without fatigue is the market expectation for eyewear, and devices generally require parts which weigh more than glasses.
They already exist. Glasses used to have heavy (at high prescription numbers) glass elements instead of plastic. HUD glasses can already fall in that weight envelope, with better weight distribution.
HUD sure, but they are dumb displays, with no useful machine perception services (ie world locked rendering.)
Basically you have about 130mw power budget. You need to do position, display, sound output, transcription, etc.
https://www.secretbatcave.co.uk/software/musing-on-openais-d... << an explanation here
World locked rendering isn't a requirement for smartglasses. Some existing ones in glasses for factor do have more limited visual positioning systems. In more obtrusive formfactors they have positioning suitable for world locked.
Of world locked rendering is just a huge waste of power at this point.
for assistant glasses to be useful, you need to know who, what, when, where for each operation that the user cares about. In the experiements that I ran, that took about 35 watts continuous on the headset (using a jetson) and at least 2 big GPU machines in the backend. This was in 2024, so perhaps its not quite as heavy now. but its nowhere near 130mw
I wonder if it might be some totally clean sheet of paper OS design but also capable of running Android applications in an emulation/virtualization layer. I think they know that any mass market handheld smartphone consumer device isn't going to succeed (windows phone) unless people can easily install all available apps from either the google play store or apple app store.
App store inertia has to be the decisive roadblock, and yeah, there would need to be some workaround.
This could also be where China gets another win because of their de-Googled Android-not-Android ecosystem which would enable more competition in their local market than can be achieved elsewhere.
But honestly, why do that when there's already a good, open-source(ish), well-designed, highly secure operating system platform that already runs Android apps? Any new clean sheet OS is either going to be worse than Android on one or more of these dimensions, or it will be absurdly expensive to vibe code.
I suspect Apple and Google can pivot pretty quickly if someone (OpenAI? Ive's company?) comes up with something clever.
But if the LLM isn't local, I'm not buying.
AI cameras won’t be accepted with open arms like the iPhone was 20 years ago. Might as well buy an Android if it’s an Android.
For the mass market, the AI industry has a trust problem.
> AI cameras won’t be accepted with open arms like the iPhone was 20 years ago. Might as well buy an Android if it’s an Android.
> For the mass market, the AI industry has a trust problem.
Oh how far we've fallen! Everyone should invite an OpenAI into their homes to watch and hear their most intimate moments. Just think of the value! Next time someone fights with their spouse, the machine can email a summary with advice the next day! Mass bliss will surely follow!
This is like people that think FB is going under because they don't use it.
ChatGPT is _enormous_. It doesn't matter if you don't trust it, half the planet does. They don't need to get the HN bubble on board.
Edit to add: the absolute state of the replies to this. Hilarious.
I mean by your own logic you can say you're doing the same thing. You think smartphones will get disrupted because you're bored by the mature form factor.
I don't see that happening unless the new hardware and the way people interact with it is truly "magical" in some sense. Smartphones as a mature device category have so many things going for them that anything new will likely come as a complement for them (which apple can capitalise on) vs a complete replacement.
> you're bored by the mature form factor.
Actually, no. It's the irrelevant changes, such as Liquid Glass, which are the problem, where we all are made to learn new stuff to keep some designers busy.
> I don't see that happening unless the new hardware and the way people interact with it is truly "magical" in some sense.
But a truly AI enabled interface _would be_ magical. Being able to have a phone where your interface to it is completely built around your preferences, and not change at the whim of some external designer, for example. Where apps are merely things it uses on your behalf in the background . . . Neither Apple or Google could do this because it would disrupt their own cash cows too much.
There is also a lot of scope for using neural nets to drive peripherals (including moving parts) in non obvious ways which could add to it all.
> where we all are made to learn new stuff
Liquid glass didn't require any relearning at all, the iOS interface changed aesthetics, not functionality. The OS has worked largely the same for the past 10 years since the iPhone X.
But I fail to see how an AI generated interface would be any better. What if after several back and forth with the AI, it still can't get the design right for you just so? It's not deterministic, you might get a different result every time you open your phone. Expecting third party services to leave their APIs open just so OpenAI phones can consume them is awfully optimistic as the moment such a device becomes an existential threat to third parties, APIs will start getting locked down.
By all means, OpenAI should try, not saying they shouldn't, but I'm not optimistic it'll be a success. The smartphone is already basically peak form factor. No one is going to want to carry around a second device, which is why every other AI device/pin is DOA. It has to come out of the gate ready to fully replace someone's smartphone and the surrounding ecosystem of it or it also is DOA. Good camera? Support spotify/apple music? messaging, video calls, airdrop/nearbyshare, works with smartwatches and fitness trackers, etc. If it doesn't, it will fail.
The AI enabled interface sounds like an Android launcher I can download to my Android-based phone that I already own. Facebook tried their own Android launcher too.
You want me to buy another Android phone AND proprietary peripherals too? In this economy?
Cope harder. How’s the Rabbit doing?
Only the HN bubble is interested in a new publicly subsidized AI phone option, over the AI phone already in their pocket at least.
Edit: what is this, Reddit?
"running Android in some form"
I think it's more likely it would be a radical departure from existing mobile OS.
More like an entirely generative experience. No discrete apps. The phone screen just morphs into whatever purpose you need at the time.
They are just feeling around in the dark looking for the killer app to save their business.
That's an odd choice. I would have thought camera modules are commodity parts (have been for a long time) and there's not much margin there.
Probably they are buying the staff, not the technology.
I'm just discovering Glass Imaging (a bit difficult as their website seems overloaded), but it seems they are in software solutions, not a hardware manufacturer or designer.
>but it seems they are in software solutions
Surely OpenAI can replicate that with their own tools in an afternoon and a few million tokens.
The article tells you right there in the 2nd paragraph what the AI connection is, and why OpenAI are presumably buying them.
This means that software is done.
Hardware is the next thing which is far more valuable IP and with its staff.
AI operates on the device.
AI model vendors will likely be torn between developing their own hardware to avoid hardware dependency or moving forward together.
Quietly, Apple and Google will take advantage of this trend.
At least something they don't claim to automate with AI. Apparently Anthropic acquired stainless for $300M instead of vibing it.
So they want to put their spying AI directly into the camera workflow, where you can't see it and can't turn it off. They will have infinite training data and also sell access to the alphabet agencies. The next level of total surveillance.
OpenAI really going after ex Apple people who start new companies or startups, eh? First Ive and now the duo behind Portrait mode.
Will be interesting to see how the legal battle plays out as well.
The bubble expands to meet the needs of the expanding bubble.
it really does seem like they’re just buying stuff up in the hopes that something accidentally turns into a profit to cover their previous investments/promises. Kind of a ponzi of acquisitions
the Jony Ive one is really interesting. it was kind of this whole "let's change the world" teaser and then we've heard literally nothing since.
Definitely changed Ive’s world with that massive paycheck!
I'm spending more money on Anthropic and OpenAI than I've ever spent on Google services outside of hardware.
I'm sick of the Android/iOS duopoly. Let them cook. The market is so ripe for disruption.
And yet Microsoft, which owns a massive portion of openAI, doesn’t bother you?
OpenAI is as bad as the rest. Anthropic likely is too but they seem a hair better. Still bad though.
Anyone want to bet that Apple will be the only one making a profit off the OpenAI Infringerator? À la android fat.
>smartphone camera maker
- doesnt make ANY cameras
- its tech (AI slop over taken picture) is used by one lonely Chinese vendor
[flagged]
OpenAI should acquire Flock </s>