Are we watching the same company? They have been shipping new features like crazy. Code interpreter blew peoples' minds, they are training GPT-5 and I bet they are leaning into multi-modal more than with GPT-4V. Strategically multimodal is the big frontier on which they are going to continue expanding datasets.

With that in mind, expanding their apps to ingest more audio and image data is an obvious strong move. (And you can see why a consumer device would help them get even more data from the real world, though it's less obvious to me that this is a win vs. just shipping apps.)

They stumbled upon a mass market product while releasing a rough research poc…

If anything it vindicates even more their initial thesis about pursuing AGI as a business goal.

Still feels like they're laser-focused on achieving AGI/aligned ASI. Improving chips and evolving the UX feel like cohesive (possibly requisite) intermediate steps

I guess they are trying to find a path to profitability and scalability: the current setup will not to scale much further, and they need some more energy efficient solution.

Only in the sense that no-one on earth knows how to get from here to true AGI. But they're making moves.

They do, and it is to accelerate their closed AI ecosystem and maintain their first mover advantage.

It might be that, or they might know exactly where to go from here, just need the hardware.

this isn't going to be a product, this is going to be for internal use only...