OpenAI, the company that brought us ChatGPT and a seemingly endless parade of increasingly capable AI models, is reportedly entering the hardware business with a phone. Because why not? According to supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, spotted by MacRumors, OpenAI is "fast-tracking" the device and aiming for mass production in early 2027.

What sort of phone will this be? One that's presumably very good at being a phone, but also very good at running AI. Kuo says it will run on a "customized version of the [MediaTek] Dimensity 9600," a chip expected this fall, following the Dimensity 9500 that powers the Vivo X300 Pro and Oppo Find X9 Pro. The headline feature, though, is the image signal processor (ISP) with "enhanced HDR," which Kuo claims will boost the phone's "real-world visual sensing capabilities." Translation: it'll see the world better, presumably to feed the AI overlords.

The phone might also come with LPDDR6 memory, UFS 5.0 storage, and a "dual-NPU architecture" to run different AI computations - like language and vision - simultaneously. Because one neural processing unit just isn't enough when you're trying to chat and see at the same time.

Kuo projects combined 2027 - 2028 shipments could hit around 30 million units. That would put OpenAI's phone in the same sales league as a typical Samsung flagship - a bold claim for a company whose first hardware product is... a phone. But hey, if you're going to disrupt, why not disrupt the most saturated market in tech?