OpenAI says its job for this year is making AI actually useful as it prepares its first ever device

Change comes as company plans to put ads in ChatGPT

(Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images)

OpenAI says that it is focused on “practical adoption” as it moves into 2026, and will aim to make artificial intelligence actually useful.

The announcement comes as the company prepares its first physical product, which is widely rumoured to be a device without a screen that will allow people to interact with similar technology to ChatGPT.

This week, Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, said during an interview with Axios that the company is “on track” to reveal that first product this year, too. He gave no indication of what the product might actually be – and said only that it would be introduced in 2026, leaving open the possibility that it might not actually be available until next year.

OpenAI has said that it working with Jony Ive, the Apple designer, and his firm LoveFrom to create the product. But it still remains largely secret.

More broadly, OpenAI is aiming to close “the gap between what AI now makes possible and how people, companies, and countries are using it day to day”, its chief financial officer Sarah Frier said in a blog post. “Our job is to close the distance between where intelligence is advancing and how individuals, companies, and countries actually adopt and use it,” she wrote.

In the same post, she suggested a host of different ways that OpenAI could make its technology more useful.

“As intelligence moves into scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge. Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created,” she wrote.

“That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path.”

She also noted that the company now offered a “a free ad- and commerce-supported tier that drives broad adoption”. Last week, OpenAI announced that it would start showing ads to users, with the chatbot offering sponsored products and services when it felt they were relevant to a conversation.