OpenAI is reported to have acquired an AI optical imaging company for 300 million U.S. dollars.

According to the latest news, US artificial intelligence company OpenAI has recently quietly completed another acquisition, apparently making technical reserves for its upcoming "AI hardware" products.

According to people familiar with the matter, the acquisition target of OpenAI is a startup named Glass Imaging, whose main business is to develop "high-quality smartphone cameras", aiming to use artificial intelligence technology to achieve "image quality comparable to that of digital SLR cameras".

Public information shows that Glass Imaging was founded by two former Apple camera algorithm engineers Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, who once participated in the development of the "Portrait Mode" for iPhone cameras.

Both of them believe that the performance of smartphone cameras has reached a bottleneck, and hope to find a new way to improve performance through the combination of hardware and software. Therefore, they founded Glass Imaging in 2019, breaking away from various restrictions of Apple to independently research related technologies.

Prior to this acquisition, Glass Imaging had raised approximately 30 million US dollars from multiple investors including Alphabet's venture capital arm GV and Insight Partners.

People familiar with the matter revealed that the acquisition valuation offered by OpenAI is 300 million US dollars, while in the last round of financing conducted last year, the company's valuation was 100 million US dollars.

Unlike many startups that only exist on presentation slides, Glass Imaging's technology has already been applied in commercially available products.

It is reported that the Honor 600 smartphone launched this year is equipped with Glass Imaging's zoom imaging technology. By applying neural network processing technology to the zoom function of mobile phones, it achieves the effect of "helping restore details, reducing noise, and maintaining natural colors and textures throughout the entire zoom range".

Neither Honor 600 (left) nor iPhone 17 (right) is equipped with a dedicated telephoto camera. The former achieves a "near-optical level" zoom effect by cropping the image from the main camera. Source: PetaPixel

Although many flagship smartphones are currently equipped with three cameras (main camera, ultra-wide-angle and telephoto), many mid-range mobile phones often do not have a dedicated telephoto lens. The same is true for many expensive foldable screen phones, because the body space of these phones is extremely limited, and a complete set of telephoto modules cannot be fitted in.

Obviously, future "AI devices" will also face the constraint of limited space for camera modules. It is still unclear what the specific purpose of OpenAI's acquisition of Glass Imaging is, and how it will integrate its AI camera algorithms into future software and hardware products.

In order to enter the AI hardware field, OpenAI spent 6.5 billion US dollars last year to acquire io Products, a company founded by Jony Ive, the former iconic designer of Apple. Ive is currently cooperating with OpenAI to develop a series of consumer-grade devices, aiming to shape the appearance and user experience of future-oriented artificial intelligence products.

It is reported that OpenAI's first smart hardware is a smart speaker with no screen but equipped with cameras and sensors, which takes "AI companionship" as its core. It hopes to allow users to communicate directly with AI at home without having to pick up their mobile phones and open applications every time.

Compared with smart speakers, the rumored OpenAI hardware under development also includes AI glasses, AI phones, AI earphones and other products, and obviously camera technology will be more useful in these subsequent devices.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Science and Technology Innovation Daily", author: Shi Zhengcheng, published by 36Kr with authorization.