Media Lab alum Ayah Bdeir argues for an open alternative to proprietary AI hardware.

By Ayah Bdeir 

When OpenAI acquired Io to create “the coolest piece of tech that the world will have ever seen,” it confirmed what industry experts have long been saying: Hardware is the new frontier for AI. AI will no longer just be an abstract thing in the cloud far away. It’s coming for our homes, our rooms, our beds, our bodies. 

That should worry us.

Once again, the future of technology is being engineered in secret by a handful of people and delivered to the rest of us as a sealed, seamless, perfect device. When technology is designed in secrecy and sold to us as a black box, we are reduced to consumers. We wait for updates. We adapt to features. We don’t shape the tools; they shape us. 

This is a problem. And not just for tinkerers and technologists, but for all of us.