The AI Tamagotchis are coming

Sam Altman onstage at OpenAI’s DevDay 2026. | Photo: Hayden Field / The Verge While AI has made plenty of inroads on people's phones and computers, it's largely failed in dedicated devices. But over the next year, two major AI companies, Meta and OpenAI, will attempt to change that.

And they're apparently betting on a similar path: testing appetites for physical hardware with their cutesy software agents. "Hardware is hard" is a tech industry mantra.