OpenAI has acquired Glass Imaging, a smartphone camera company, in a deal worth over $300 million, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. Because if there's one thing the maker of ChatGPT needed, it was a better way to photograph your lunch.

Glass Imaging, founded in 2019 and based in Los Altos, California, had previously raised about $30 million in funding. That's a tidy 10x return for investors, assuming they didn't spend it all on ultra-wide lenses.

The company was founded by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, two former Apple engineers who previously led the team that developed Apple's Portrait Mode. So yes, the people responsible for that blurry-background feature that occasionally mistakes your ear for a shrubbery are now working for OpenAI.

At Glass Imaging, Attar and Bishop use AI to overcome the physical size constraints of smartphone cameras. Rather than using AI to edit a photo after it's been taken, the company uses neural networks to learn about individual camera systems - like the different cameras on various smartphone models - to yield better images from the moment the shutter clicks. In other words, they're teaching your phone to see better, not just to Photoshop away its mistakes.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment, presumably because it was busy rummaging through its couch cushions for $300 million in loose change.

The ChatGPT maker is rumored to be working on its own hardware, like smartphones, earbuds, and AI companion devices. Because what the world desperately needs is another screen to stare at, now with slightly less noisy low-light performance.

In 2025, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and famed Apple designer Jony Ive revealed that they had been working together on a device startup called io, when OpenAI bought Ive's company for $6.5 billion. That's billion with a B, which makes this $300 million camera deal look like a rounding error - or at least a decent down payment on a really nice lens.