Following the same reasoning, smartwatches would have been a failure. They might be niche, but sales prove there is a market to explore/deepen.

Overall, openAI can sit on a mountain of money and bet mobile phones are the final form factor for human/AI interaction, as they have been for human/internet.

Or deploy some of that money and figure out whether that is true.

It’s also about creating an environment for those features to emerge, without being constrained by someone else platform, that could natively embed it at any time, and (probably more important) app marketplaces.

A signal for opportunity is also given by Apple’s inability to give their users Siri and Google sitting on transformers while OpenAI grabs the chatbot marketplace.

Also, anything they build does not cannibalize their other product lines.

There are lots of incentives for them to try out and figure out features on the fly, which arguably also happened with the IPhone (app store).