Apple gave its iPhone Product Design team bonuses worth "several hundred thousand dollars" in an effort to keep them from being poached by other companies, reports Bloomberg. The bonuses were provided as restricted stock units (RSUs) that will vest over a four-year period.
Hardware designers given bonuses will need to stay with Apple to get the full value of the stock award, which can range from $200,000 to $400,000 or even more depending on how Apple stock does over the next several years.
Apple executives are concerned with the number of engineers the company has been losing to rivals like OpenAI. Several former Apple designers are now working on hardware products at OpenAI, including former Apple design chief Jony Ive. OpenAI has been recruiting Apple engineers that worked on the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Vision Pro, and it has hired over 40 former Apple employees.
In 2021 and 2022, Apple also handed out stock bonuses to engineers in silicon design, hardware, software, and operations to thwart poaching and increase employee retention.
OpenAI has a Mac "superapp" in development that unifies its ChatGPT app, Codex coding platform, and Atlas browser, reports The Wall Street Journal ($).
The idea behind the all-in-one app is to simplify the user experience, following the launch of several standalone products, some of which haven't resonated with OpenAI's customers. The company is also trying to bounce back after the recent successes of its main rival, Anthropic.
OpenAI executives are said to be looking at areas it can deprioritize while it focuses on creating agentic AI capabilities within the new superapp that can work autonomously on a user's computer to carry out various tasks like writing code and analyzing data.
In an all-hands meeting last week, OpenAI's chief of applications Fidji Simo reportedly told employees they couldn't afford to be distracted by "side quests" given Anthropic's rapid success winning over enterprise and coding customers. From the report:
An OpenAI spokeswoman said the new "superapp" will enable teams inside OpenAI to work more closely together, and help the research division focus its efforts around improving one central product. Over the coming months, the company expects to add new "agentic" capabilities within its Codex app so it can help with productivity-related tasks beyond coding before merging ChatGPT and the Atlas browser into the superapp as well.
OpenAI unveiled a series of major initiatives last year, like its Sora video app and the acquisition of Jony Ive's AI hardware venture. Since then, however, Anthropic has gained strong momentum with the success of its Code Claude and Cowork offerings.
The WSJ report gave no timeline for the launch of OpenAI's so-called superapp, but it said the company's mobile ChatGPT app will remain unchanged.
On March 8, for the first time in Colombia’s history, an artificial intelligence candidate appeared on ballot papers across the country.
Gaitana IA (AI) ran for the Indigenous seat in the Senate and the House of Representatives in the northern state of Sucre.
While Gaitana did not win a seat in either of the country’s legislative bodies, it has sparked debate about the role of AI in Colombian politics.
With the ballots counted, Gaitana won a total of under 3,000 votes – less than 2% of the total votes for the Indigenous seat – suggesting that many people remain skeptical of this new digital approach.
Many questions have emerged surrounding Gaitana, such as why the Registraduría—the Colombian entity in charge of validating and accepting candidates—permitted this unprecedented candidacy, or what the intentions were behind the AI.
“Many local media outlets talked about an AI going to Congress, but that is not the case; they are humans leading the project,” Gaitana’s co-founder, Natalia Aase, told The Bogotá Post.
“It is actually a consensus tool developed by our community members, between 14 and 25 years old, from the Senú community of Reparo Torrente, in Coveñas,” she explained.
Rather than planning for the AI to assume office, Gaitana was devised as a democratic experiment underpinned by real human candidates
Aase detailed how the platform was designed to work: Colombian citizens could subscribe through a link to virtually participate and propose various debates regarding topics such as healthcare, women’s rights, and more. These interactions would also feed the AI database.
Once an initiative reached a collective consensus, the people occupying the seats in Congress would “decide the direction of the proposed laws.”
The two humans represented by Gaitana were Carlos Redondo Rincón, a Mechatronics Engineer from the Senú community, who was running for Senate, and Luz Rincón, an Embera-Katio Indigenous sociologist, who was seeking a seat in the House of Representatives.
The co-founder of Gaitana also revealed that the team conducted deep research into global democratic models, such as the one in Norway, and compared them with their own community dynamics.
As the research advanced, the team found that their community in Senú had already established a model of social interaction that worked well, prompting them to launch a digital project modeled on their own practices.
This meant digitizing their traditional way of reaching a consensus; in the Senú community, men, women, and youth gather around tables to discuss specific topics, such as women’s health or local fishing.
“Gaitana IA is not a generative AI; it is a participatory AI. What does that mean? Well, it is not ChatGPT. Instead, it takes the information provided by the users and organizes it,” pointed out Aase. “Transparency and security are the most important things for us; that is why we use blockchain technology—a system of blocks—to power this platform.”
According to Aase, the project was born from a motivation to prevent corruption and explained that with ‘Gaitana AI’, the decisions are not made by a single person but must be approved by at least 100 people.
“You might be able to manipulate one individual, but you cannot manipulate a hundred if you don’t even know who they are,” she concluded.
OpenAI is confronting the enormous cost of running ChatGPT at global scale, prompting a shift toward ads, new pricing tiers, and long-term revenue strategies to keep the service sustainable
OpenAI is working on several AI hardware devices in partnership with former Apple designer Jony Ive, and the first product that comes out could be a smart speaker. The company is developing a smart speaker, a smart lamp, and considering AI glasses, according to The Information, with the speaker set to come out in early 2027.
OpenAI's smart speaker has an integrated camera and it is designed to learn information about who is using it and what's around them. It will include a facial recognition feature similar to Face ID, and users will be able to use the speaker to make purchases. The speaker will have AI integration, so users can ask it questions and make requests.
In an internal presentation, OpenAI employees were told that the speaker would observe users and suggest actions to help them achieve goals, such as suggesting an early bedtime ahead of a morning meeting.
Apple is working on a similar home hub device that's set to come out this year. The home hub will include an integrated camera and speaker for video calls and controlling smart home products, plus it will have deep integration with the updated version of Siri that Apple is developing.
OpenAI is planning to price the speaker between $200 and $300, with a launch planned for February 2027 at the earliest. OpenAI is exploring a smart lamp and smart glasses, but those products won't be ready until 2028 or later. With the exception of the speaker, OpenAI's hardware development is in the early stages and other products could be canceled.
Jony Ive has been working with OpenAI since OpenAI acquired Ive's hardware firm io in May 2025. Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have shared some details on their AI hardware work, suggesting that there was an established prototype in November 2025. At the time, Ive and Altman said the device would be "peaceful" and an "active participant" that's not annoying. The duo also described the device as a product that would "make people feel joy."
Additional rumors about OpenAI's plans came following an employee meeting, where Ive and Altman said they didn't want a device with a screen. The device, which is presumably the speaker that The Information says is in development, was described as pocket-sized and contextually aware of the user's surroundings. Altman told employees it's "the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen."
While Altman and Ive have promised the next big thing after the iPhone, there is some internal tension at OpenAI. Ive's LoveFrom design company has remained separate from OpenAI, but LoveFrom is providing hardware designs to OpenAI. It's up to OpenAI's hardware and software engineers to actually make the products that LoveFrom comes up with.
OpenAI employees have apparently complained about LoveFrom's secrecy and slow speed when it comes to design revisions. Former Apple designer Evans Hankey is leading industrial design, and Ive is said to be making the final call on almost all design choices. Other former Apple employees working at OpenAI on hardware include Tang Tan and Scott Cannon, plus Eddy Cue's son Adam Cue is working on OpenAI software.
If you’d like to maintain and ad-free AI experience, you might want to consider using Claude, which offers free AI tools, web chat, and clients for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, all of which are free from advertising clutter. Why are you mentioning this? Well, you might have seen that OpenAI has recently announced that ChatGPT ... Read More
As OpenAI is making plans to introduce ads to ChatGPT, competitor Anthropic has promised to keep Claude ad-free. In a blog post today, the company said that there are "many good places for advertising," but a "conversation with Claude is not one of them."
According to Anthropic, including ads in Claude would not be in line with its mission of creating a helpful assistant for work and deep thinking. Anthropic claims that users should not need to second-guess whether an AI is being helpful or "subtly steering the conversation towards something monetizable."
There will be no ads or sponsored links in conversations with Claude, and Claude's responses will not be influenced by advertisers or include third-party product placements.
Our analysis of conversations with Claude (conducted in a way that keeps all data private and anonymous) shows that an appreciable portion involve topics that are sensitive or deeply personal--the kinds of conversations you might have with a trusted advisor. Many other uses involve complex software engineering tasks, deep work, or thinking through difficult problems. The appearance of ads in these contexts would feel incongruous--and, in many cases, inappropriate.
Promising an ad-free experience could encourage people to choose Claude over OpenAI's ChatGPT. In January, OpenAI said that it would start testing ads in the United States for free and Go tier subscribers, though subscribers with higher paid tiers will not see ads. OpenAI claims that ads will be clearly labeled and will not influence the answers that ChatGPT provides, nor will the company provide conversation details to advertisers.
To further reinforce the difference between Claude's ad-free experience and ChatGPT's ad-supported experience, Anthropic plans to run a humorous Super Bowl commercial where a man gets an unwanted cougar dating ad after asking about his mother. "Ads are coming to AI," reads the video's text. "But not to Claude."
Anthropic plans to continue to monetize through enterprise contracts and paid subscriptions, with revenue reinvested in improving Claude. Anthropic will maintain a free tier, and the company says that it may also offer lower-cost subscription tiers and regional pricing in the future if there is demand for it. Claude Pro is priced at $20 per month, which is the same price as ChatGPT's higher-end Plus tier.
An ad-free Claude experience isn't a sure thing forever, as Anthropic gives itself an out in the blog post: "Should we need to revisit this approach, we'll be transparent about our reasons for doing so."
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