OpenAI's iPhone moment & more (April 8, 2025)

Hey crew,

It’s been a week of wild turns in the AI world — from a screenless phone that might channel the vibe of Her, to Shopify rewriting its hiring playbook around AI, to resurrecting extinct species (yes, really).

Let’s break it down.

🧠 OpenAI’s “iPhone Moment”?

Sam Altman and Jony Ive — two names that don’t typically appear in the same sentence — are quietly building a device at the intersection of AI and design. The concept? A voice-first gadget with no screen, reportedly in the works under a secretive startup called io Products.

Now OpenAI’s looking to bring that entire project in-house for over $500M.

Why this matters:

If you're betting on AI interfaces becoming more ambient and less screen-dependent (I am), this could be the hardware moment we've been waiting for. Not another headset. Not another chatbot. Something that actually feels new.

Also: Altman’s involved both as CEO of OpenAI and backer of io Products — so expect a whole lot of ethical discourse if this goes through.

📸 Gemini Gets Vision

Google's Gemini just leveled up. It's now rolling out “Project Astra” features to more Android phones — allowing the AI to interpret the world in real time via camera or screen share.

Think: you show it a document, a sunset, or your messy fridge, and it talks to you about what it sees.

Right now it’s closer to fancy Google Lens than Jarvis, but the leap toward context-aware assistants feels more real than hype.

If they bundle this with smartglasses (and you know they will), we might be living in a wearable-first world sooner than expected.

🛑 Shopify’s AI Mandate

Tobi Lütke just told every team at Shopify to justify that a task can't be completed with AI before hiring a human.

In a leaked memo, he laid down a rule: no new hires unless the task clearly can’t be done by AI. Performance reviews will now factor in AI usage. And they’re distributing tools like Claude and Cursor across departments.

This is not a suggestion. It’s the baseline.

My Takeaway:

While many companies are still tiptoeing around AI ethics and rollout plans, Shopify just turned the dial up to 11. Hiring is no longer about more hands on deck — it’s about whether you’ve exhausted every machine option first. This is the future of lean teams.

🧬 AI & De-Extinction: Dire Wolves Are Back

Colossal Biosciences — an AI-powered de-extinction company — just introduced three new dire wolves. Yes, the same prehistoric predators you saw in Game of Thrones are now alive in real life.

They’re aiming to revive the woolly mammoth next. Wild times.

📊 Quick Hits

China’s catching up: According to Stanford’s new AI Index, Chinese models are now on par with top U.S. LLMs in benchmark performance. Investment still lags, but innovation clearly doesn’t.
OpenAI's roadmap: Expect an “o3” and “o4-mini” model before GPT-5. Smaller, leaner, and likely less expensive — think stepping stones.
Runway’s Gen-4 Turbo: Real-time 10s video gen in 30s. Creative workflows are going to get weird — in a good way.
Zapier tutorial: They dropped a slick walkthrough on building AI-powered sales reps that triage leads and draft emails. If your pipeline is a mess, this is worth bookmarking.

🤖 Tools I’m Keeping an Eye On

EverTutor Live — an AI voice tutor that adapts in real-time.
iAsk AI — rapidly becoming the go-to search engine for instant answers.
Kozy — edit pro-level videos from prompts. Wildly good for creators.
GitSummarize — auto-docs any GitHub repo into usable summaries.

That’s it for now. If this newsletter gave you at least one useful idea or a fresh angle to chew on, forward it to a friend. Or better yet — tell me what you’re building with all this.

Until next time,

David