A trademark application filed Friday (Jan. 31) by OpenAI reportedly suggests new product lines the company could pursue.
Some of these product lines could be introduced in the near term while others may be more speculative, TechCrunch reported Monday (Feb. 3).
OpenAI’s trademark application includes headphones, goggles, glasses, remotes, laptop and phone cases, smartwatches, smart jewelry, and virtual and augmented reality headsets, according to the report.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said this week that the company aims to develop AI-powered consumer hardware but that doing so would take several years, per the report.
The application also mentioned robots, and OpenAI began hiring for a new robotics team, the report said.
Custom AI chips and quantum computing are also mentioned in the application, per the report.
While OpenAI’s trademark application may reveal domains the company is exploring, it doesn’t necessarily indicate that the company will bring products in the categories to market, according to the report.
This news came on the same day that OpenAI and the SoftBank Group announced that they agreed to establish a joint venture company that will market enterprise AI solutions to major companies in Japan.
In addition, SoftBank will spend $3 billion annually to integrate new enterprise AI and existing tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT Enterprise across its group companies.
OpenAI also debuted an AI tool dubbed “deep research” Monday, saying the tool is capable of performing multistep online research and “accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.”
Powered by an iteration of OpenAI’s upcoming o3 AI model that is designed for web browsing and data analysis, deep research will use the company’s ChatGPT chatbot to find, analyze and synthesize online sources like images, text and PDFs to create a report.
It was reported Thursday (Jan. 30) that OpenAI is in talks for a $40 billion funding round that would be led by SoftBank. Some of the capital raised in the round would go toward the $18 billion OpenAI has committed to contribute to the Stargate AI infrastructure joint venture, which also includes SoftBank, and some would support OpenAI’s money-losing business operations.
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