AI Daily: OpenAI considers buying Altman’s AI hardware startup

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

AI HARDWARE STARTUP: Microsoft (MSFT)-backed OpenAI has discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple (AAPL) design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, The Information’s Stephanie Palazzolo and Jessica E. Lessin report. OpenAI could pay around $500M for io Products, according to the report.

LOW AI CHIP SALES: Samsung Electronics (SSNLF) is expected to forecast a 21% drop in Q1 operating profit to approximately 5.2T won, or $3.62B, hurt by sluggish sales of high bandwidth memory chips and continued losses in its contract chip manufacturing business, reports Heekyong Yang of Reuters. The company has reportedly fallen behind rival SK Hynix (HXSCL) in supplying high-performance memory chips for AI leader Nvidia (NVDA). Analysts also noted potential headwinds from U.S. import tariffs impacting Samsung’s mobile and home appliance segments, and suggested its new U.S. factory start-up could be delayed further to 2027. Samsung’s mobile division profit is seen slightly higher year-over-year helped by smartphone shipments and favorable currency exchange.

GOOGLE CLOUD NEXT: BofA notes that Google (GOOGL) will host its Cloud Next conference from April 9-11 and sees the opening keynote from Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian on Day 1 being the “top event for updates on Google’s cloud and AI strategy.” The firm, which thinks the event can “potentially boost AI sentiment on the stock,” keeps a Buy rating and $225 price target on shares of Google parent Alphabet.

GOOGLE AI MODE: Google is now making AI Mode available to millions more Labs users in the U.S. “With AI Mode’s new multimodal understanding, you can snap a photo or upload an image, ask a question about it and get a rich, comprehensive response with links to dive deeper. This experience brings together powerful visual search capabilities in Lens with a custom version of Gemini, so you can easily ask complex questions about what you see,” Robby Stein, VP of Product, Google Search says. “AI Mode builds on our years of work on visual search and takes it a step further. With Gemini’s multimodal capabilities, AI Mode can understand the entire scene in an image, including the context of how objects relate to one another and their unique materials, colors, shapes and arrangements. Drawing on our deep visual search expertise, Lens precisely identifies each object in the image. Using our query fan-out technique, AI Mode then issues multiple queries about the image as a whole and the objects within the image, accessing more breadth and depth of information than a traditional search on Google. The result is a response that’s incredibly nuanced and contextually relevant, so you take the next step.”