If you’ve been following OpenAI and ChatGPT over the past few years, you probably know how much the company has grown and how capable the AI has become. But this is still just the beginning. The chatbot will soon become a personal assistant, with Jony Ive’s io (now an OpenAI property) manufacturing the dedicated hardware.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman has teased time and again the future of ChatGPT, an AI that knows everything about you and can help in a variety of ways. The leaked details about the ChatGPT io device also point to the same scenario. The gadget will sit on a desk, around our necks, or in our pockets, armed with new social and ambient computing skills that let it function as an always-on assistant that can tell different speakers apart.
OpenAI has yet to announce the device or introduce the ChatGPT abilities that will allow the chatbot to perform as an assistant. For that to happen, the AI would need access to numerous apps on a phone and computer, like email, messages, and the calendar, in addition to mastering social cues as part of the ambient computing layer that OpenAI is developing.
That said, the AI firm has now confirmed its plans for a “super-assistant” via documentation filed with the court in the Google antitrust case. Those plans are quite ambitious, too. It should happen this year, well before the ChatGPT io hardware device gets a proper announcement.
The legal document (via The Verge) titled “ChatGPT: H1 2025 Strategy” is heavily redacted, likely to conceal some of the secrets OpenAI doesn’t want the public to learn before an official reveal. The document was created last year, which we know because it discusses the two halves of 2025 in terms of OpenAI product development planning.
But some paragraphs were left in the document without any redactions, spelling out OpenAI’s intentions for ChatGPT this year:
In the first half of next year, we’ll start evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant: one that knows you, understands what you care about, and helps with any task that a smart, trustworthy, emotionally intelligent person with a computer could do. The timing is right. Models like o2 and o3 are finally smart enough to reliably perform agentic tasks, tools like computer use can boost ChatGPT’s ability to take action, and interaction paradigms like multimodality and generative UI allow both ChatGPT and users to express themselves in the best way for the task.
What exactly is a super-assistant? It’s an intelligent entity with T-shaped skills. It’s an entity because it’s personalized to you and available anywhere you go including chatgpt.com, our native apps, phone, email, or third-party surfaces like Siri. It’s T shaped because it has broad skills for daily tasks that are tedious, and deep expertise for tasks that most people find impossible (starting with coding). The broad part is all about making life easier: answering a question, finding a home, contacting a lawyer, joining a gym, planning vacations, buying gifts, managing calendars, keeping track of todos, sending emails. The deep part is about
Having been a ChatGPT user for so long, I can tell you ChatGPT isn’t a super-assistant right now. It can’t be, considering it doesn’t have unlimited access to user data, especially on phones. Even if it did, I’m not ready to trust an AI model with access to personal data without knowing how that data is secured and without clear privacy protections in place.
Also, the first half of 2025 is almost over, and we have no idea whether OpenAI has had any success evolving ChatGPT into a super-assistant. The company has achieved plenty of AI developments this year, but we still lack an official announcement on that front.
The point of the document isn’t to leak OpenAI’s ChatGPT strategy for the near future. OpenAI also makes those disclosures to signal potential issues with achieving them. One of them is facing heavy competition from AI rivals, including Google. The problem is that Google might have an advantage here when it comes to a critical piece of its operation: online search. And that’s a key feature for AI chatbots like ChatGPT.
OpenAI thinks that “real choice drives competition and benefits everyone,” saying in the document that companies like Google, Apple, and Microsoft should let users choose their default search engine and make their search indexes available to ChatGPT. Similarly, OpenAI says ChatGPT should be an option for users choosing AI assistants on iPhone, Android, and Windows.
The final ruling in the Google antitrust case will undoubtedly impact tech companies, including AI firms. But I’m sure the plans for turning ChatGPT into a “super-assistant” will go forward no matter what happens in the landmark monopoly case, and I’m excited to see where it leads.
On that note, I’ll point out that everyone else is building super-assistants as well. Look at what Apple wants to do with Siri on the iPhone (despite the obvious Apple Intelligence setbacks) or at Google’s advanced Project Astra ideas for Gemini Live.
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