OpenAI raids Apple's talent for new AI hardware

PLUS: xAI's Grok 4 is 98% cheaper and Waymo's impressive new safety data

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Gen AI Art
September 23, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 9 minutes

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OpenAI is signaling a serious push into hardware, poaching top talent directly from Apple's hardware divisions. The company is assembling a team to build a new generation of AI-first devices, aiming to move beyond just software.

The move shows an ambition to control the entire AI experience, from the underlying models to the physical device in a user's hand. But can the company that defined the AI software race successfully pivot to challenge the hardware dominance of the very company it's raiding for talent?

Today in AI:

  • OpenAI raids Apple's talent for new AI hardware

  • xAI's hyper-efficient Grok 4 model

  • Waymo's impressive new safety data

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What's new? OpenAI has launched a major hiring offensive focused on Apple's hardware teams, signaling a serious push to create its own line of AI-native devices.

What matters?

  • Former Apple executive Tang Tan is leading the hardware push, recruiting dozens of Apple veterans with compensation packages reportedly exceeding $1 million.

  • The company is partnering with key iPhone manufacturers Luxshare and Goertek to develop its initial devices, with a display-less smart speaker being a primary focus.

  • The long-term vision includes a family of devices like glasses and wearables, with design input from Jony Ive and a potential launch in late 2026 or early 2027.

Why it matters?

By hiring the talent that built Apple's iconic products, OpenAI is showing its ambition to control the entire AI experience from software to hardware. This move positions OpenAI to create a new category of AI-native devices, potentially challenging the smartphone's dominance.

PROMPT STATION

What's new? Elon Musk's xAI has unveiled Grok 4 Fast, a new model that delivers performance comparable to its predecessor but with a stunning 98% price reduction.

What matters?

  • Grok 4 Fast achieves its efficiency by using 40% fewer reasoning tokens than the full Grok 4 model, drastically lowering the cost for developers on benchmark tasks.

  • The model already tops search tasks in LMArena and scores impressively on reasoning benchmarks, even surpassing larger models like Claude 4.1 Opus on specific science and math tests.

  • Beyond speed and cost, the model supports a massive 2M token context window and features native tool integration for web browsing and code execution.

Why it matters?

This launch makes near-frontier AI performance accessible to a much wider range of developers and businesses. The extreme cost reduction accelerates the trend of AI becoming a ubiquitous, low-cost utility for complex tasks.

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What's new? A massive peer-reviewed study confirms Waymo's autonomous vehicles are significantly safer than human drivers, fueling its expansion into new cities like the just-announced launch in Nashville.

What matters?

  • The study, covering over 56 million miles, found Waymo vehicles are involved in incidents with 85% fewer serious injuries compared to human-driven cars, according to a peer-reviewed analysis.

  • This impressive safety record is fueling rapid adoption, with Waymo's service seeing an approximate 25x growth in paid rides over the last two years, now reaching 250,000 rides per week.

  • Building on this momentum, the company continues to expand its national footprint through its new partnership with Lyft, making autonomous rides more accessible to the public.

Why it matters?

Waymo's data provides compelling evidence that autonomous technology can drastically improve road safety. The challenge now shifts from proving the technology's viability to ensuring regulatory frameworks and public acceptance can keep up with its deployment.

Everything else in AI

Oracle is negotiating a multi-year, $20B cloud computing deal with Meta to provide the massive capacity required for AI model training and deployment.

Mistral released Magistral Small and Medium 1.2, updating its reasoning model family with new multimodal capabilities, upgraded tool use, and overall performance boosts.

Code Integrity revealed a critical prompt injection vulnerability in Notion's new AI agents, demonstrating how malicious prompts could be used to exfiltrate confidential data from users' private pages.

Scale AI introduced SWE-Bench Pro, an updated and more challenging version of its widely used benchmark for evaluating the software development capabilities of AI agents.

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