🤖 OpenAI’s Secretive AI-Powered Gadget Delayed to 2027

📦 OpenAI’s Secretive AI-Powered Gadget Delayed to 2027

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In May 2025, OpenAI acquired io Products, Inc. for nearly $6.5 billion, gaining legendary Apple designer Jony Ive and his hand-picked team of 55 designers, architects, and engineers.

In June 2025, iyO, Inc. sued OpenAI, alleging they met with them to discuss their in-ear technology, even demoing the “iyO One”: AI-enabled earbuds designed to be the world’s first audio computer.

In January 2026, the secretive AI-powered gadget, internally codenamed “Gumdrop,” was reportedly a “lickable” pen that transcribes handwritten notes directly into ChatGPT, converting doodles and sketches into machine-readable digital records.

It allegedly featured a “to-go” audio model architecture that can hear and speak naturally and contextually to anticipate your needs, achieving more natural speech patterns with faster response times.

Now, recent court filings in the federal trademark case for iyO, Inc. vs. io Products, Inc. show that OpenAI’s been ordered not to use the brand name “io” in connection with the “naming, advertising, marketing, or sale of any AI-enabled hardware products.”

This federal trademark case forced OpenAI to disclose certain details about the secretive AI-powered gadget. We know it’s a “palm-sized object” that “relies solely on audio and visual cues.” It’s rumored to be screenless to promote less socially disruptive experiences.

For the past two decades, our digital lives have been dominated by typing, tapping, and touching. Now, is the hands-free era emerging, where technology is built around voice controls? Well, it looks like we’ll have to wait until next year to find out.

After analyzing approximately 200 employees at a U.S.-based technology company for roughly eight months, HBR uncovered that AI consistently “broadened the job scope,” meaning they worked at a faster pace and extended their workday, often without being asked.

The U.S.-based technology company didn’t mandate the adoption of AI. On their own initiative, the approximately 200 employees did more because AI made doing more “feel possible, accessible, and intrinsically rewarding.” But after the novelty of their newfound superpowers wore off, they reported “burnout” and “cognitive fatigue.”

When conducting 40 in-depth interviews across the design, product, and engineering teams, each team member consistently conveyed that AI “blurred boundaries between work and non-work.” Because AI made beginning a basic task so easy, team members slipped small amounts of work into lunch breaks. Over time, it produced a workday with “fewer natural pauses” and a “more continuous involvement with work.”

In 1865, English economist William Stanley Jevons noticed something surprising. When engineers invented more efficient engines that relied on less coal, Britain’s total coal consumption still increased. He coined this phenomenon the “Rebound Effect,” where increased efficiency of a resource doesn’t decrease total consumption, but rather increases it.

The same phenomenon happens when we adopt AI. Even though it reduces the mental effort required to complete a simple daily task, we don’t just finish that simple daily task faster and move on. Instead, we end up doing more of them.

Hauler Hero raised a $16M Series A for AI-based waste management.

Entire closed a $60M Seed Round to store the reasoning behind code.

Vega landed a $120M Series B to detect and disable cyber threats.

Docusign (San Francisco, CA): Corporate Affairs Intern, Summer 2026

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OpenAI (San Francisco, CA): iOS Engineer, Social Products, Mid-Level

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