The recent days have witnessed divergent opinions from AI firms regarding the prospects of smartphones. Perplexity believes AI will primarily benefit iPhones, while OpenAI allegedly contends that its own smartphone could make them redundant.
I would wager significantly that the OpenAI smartphone will either never come to fruition or will end up being a commercial failure, but I still regard the endeavor as positive news for iPhone users.
## Perplexity: AI won’t affect the iPhone
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas holds that AI does not pose a threat to the iPhone; in fact, the opposite is true.
> Here’s my take. I haven’t expressed this before. The phone, the iPhone, is not being disrupted by AI at all. In fact, the better AI performs, the iPhone essentially becomes your digital passport.
He asserts that the iPhone is integral to how we navigate our lives, and that reality is not set to change.
## OpenAI smartphone
Should a Ming-Ching Kuo report be accurate, OpenAI opposes this view. He indicates that the company is developing its own smartphone.
> OpenAI is collaborating with MediaTek and Qualcomm to create smartphone processors, with Luxshare as the exclusive partner for co-design and manufacturing. Mass production is anticipated to commence in 2028.
The firm’s vision is that the operating system will center around AI agents rather than apps. In simpler terms, you won’t launch a particular app to complete a task – instead, you will assign the task to an AI agent.
## OpenAI will be partially correct … eventually
In principle, I believe OpenAI is right in asserting that humans have objectives they wish to accomplish, and that apps are merely one of the tools at our disposal.
I would love to simply grab my iPhone, instruct Siri regarding what I actually want to achieve, and then receive confirmation a few seconds or minutes later that the task has been completed. For instance, tell Siri to arrange a trip, confident that it knows all my preferences for airlines, seating, hotels, etc.; that it can utilize my frequent flyer miles for the journey; that it has access to my calendar to ensure the timings align; and so forth.
I do believe we will ultimately reach that point, and once we do, the notion of human-operated apps will be at least somewhat obsolete. However, this certainly isn’t going to happen by 2028! Given the current blunders made by AI systems, it will be a significant amount of time before I’ll trust an agent with any important tasks, let alone something as complex as managing travel arrangements.
Even when it eventually does occur, this doesn’t imply we will abandon our iPhones. The Apple ecosystem will grow even more crucial in this interconnected landscape, and the attractiveness of the iPhone maker’s privacy strategy will only heighten.
## But I wish for it to happen
Nonetheless, although I believe an OpenAI smartphone would fail, I would be truly pleased to see the company take the plunge. It will expedite the shift beyond apps and into AI-agent delegated tasks, and it will compel Apple to advance more quickly in this direction.
We won’t be relinquishing our iPhones, but they will become smarter and faster due to this competitive impetus.