OPENAI, 2021

The dream of a thinking machine is older than the machine itself. From the mechanical turk to Alan Turing’s tests, humanity has long pursued artificial minds, as both a philosophical mirror and an economic tool.

In recent years, AI was no longer a theoretical pursuit — it was a cultural inevitability. The conversation moved from “can we build intelligence?’ to ‘how will intelligence build the world?”

By the time OpenAI was founded in 2015, the world had already acclimated to the idea that AI wasn’t science fiction — it was a structural force, reshaping labor, creativity, and decision-making.

In 2021, while working on Worldcoin, we sketched a handheld AI device for Sam Altman, founder at both Worldcoin and OpenAI.

The mission to build highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work raises the question: if AI is doing the work, what’s left for us?

If knowledge is power, then predictive power is the new currency.

We wanted to encapsulate the spirit of prediction-as-plaything — a pocket-sized oracle that made the vast abstraction of AI into something personal, intimate, and tangible.

The appeal of a predictive AI is twofold: first, it satisfies a cultural addiction to foreknowledge, the same drive that fuels everything from horoscopes to financial forecasting. Second, it acts as a mirror — an oracle that reflects back not an absolute future, but a probabilistic one, shaped by our own data and patterns.

If every decision is prefigured by machine intelligence, every question has a computed answer, what’s left for human intuition is to ask the remaining questions. What if AI can become an arbiter of this process?

If Google was the last great library, OpenAI aspires to be the last great oracle, the entity to which all questions are posed. Our design for OpenAI was an early symbol of this trajectory: machine intelligence as a personal, intimate force.

Perhaps AI’s greatest function is to remind us that the future, no matter how well-predicted, is always uncertain.

The OpenAI Tamagotchi doesn’t tell you what will happen. It tells you what might. And maybe that’s all the prophecy we need.