Cheng Chen, Apple's senior director of optics for Vision Pro, is the latest executive to defect to OpenAI's hardware division, confirming a systematic talent drain that's reshaping who gets to build the next physical layer of AI.
Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported this week that Chen, who oversaw optics engineering for the Vision Pro and Apple's broader display technology programs, has been hired by OpenAI's growing hardware team. He won't be lonely there. OpenAI has now pulled more than 40 Apple engineers in recent months, spanning camera systems, iPhone and Mac hardware, silicon design, industrial design, audio, smartwatches, and Vision Pro development. The organization absorbing them, built around the $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's startup io, is assembling something that looks less like a software company's hardware experiment and more like a serious consumer electronics operation.
The timing is not a coincidence. Apple's Vision Pro is, for practical purposes, finished. The company sold roughly 600,000 units total across the product's lifetime, and the M5 refresh released in late 2025, which brought a 120Hz display, 10% more rendered pixels, and 30 more minutes of battery life at the same $3,499 price, failed to move the needle. MacRumors and AppleInsider both confirmed in late April that Apple had disbanded the Vision Products Group, with the 1,000-person team redistributed across other divisions. Mike Rockwell, who created Vision Pro, took visionOS software into Craig Federighi's organization. The hardware remnant, led by Paul Meade, exists to support the current M5 unit and Apple's smart glasses project, codenamed N50. A next-generation headset is off the table.
That's a vacancy OpenAI is filling fast. Tang Tan, a 25-year Apple veteran who worked on iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, now serves as OpenAI's chief hardware officer, reporting directly to Sam Altman. Jony Ive, as creative and design lead across OpenAI and io, adds the institutional knowledge of a man who designed the products that made modern consumer hardware the expectation it now is. Chen's optics background slots into a specific gap: OpenAI's reported device roadmap includes smart glasses, and glasses without excellent optics are just frames.
The clearest picture of OpenAI's hardware ambitions comes from its manufacturing moves. The company shifted its initial production order from China's Luxshare to Foxconn, with assembly targeted for Vietnam or the U.S. Initial production targets of 40 to 50 million units reflect a company thinking at smartphone scale, not startup scale. The screenless flagship device, sometimes referenced internally as "Gumdrop," is designed around voice-first interaction and what Ive has described as "calm computing," a deliberate rejection of the screen-addiction dynamics he helped create at Apple. Beyond it, OpenAI is developing a smart speaker, AI-enabled glasses, and a wearable pin, with OpenAI's chief global affairs officer Chris Lehane confirming at Davos that the first device would debut in the second half of 2026.
Whether OpenAI can actually ship any of this is the question no one has answered yet, and it's worth being direct: hardware is where AI companies go to learn how hard hardware is. The supply chain, the manufacturing tolerances, the return rates, the regulatory certifications, the retail logistics , none of it maps cleanly from software. Apple sold 600,000 Vision Pro units and considered it a failure. A screenless AI device targeting tens of millions of units is an ambition of a completely different order, and Foxconn partnership announcements don't close that gap on their own.
Still, the talent poaching tells you something real about the power dynamics here. Apple is simultaneously losing its most capable hardware engineers to OpenAI and attempting to pivot its own spatial computing ambitions toward smart glasses, with the N50 program now the flag it's planting. Analysts at AppleInsider reported in late May that Apple Glasses won't arrive until late 2027 at the earliest, leaving OpenAI a clear runway if it can execute.
The broader executive picture at Apple compounds the problem. AI chief John Giannandrea retired this year. UI design head Alan Dye left for Meta. The wave of departures, which Fortune described in December as the most extensive executive overhaul since Steve Jobs died, has hollowed out institutional knowledge in exactly the divisions that would need to lead a hardware comeback. You don't rebuild that overnight, regardless of how many internal reshuffles Tim Cook orders.
OpenAI, for its part, is doing what any company with $6.5 billion spent and a consumer device deadline does: it's hiring the people who've already shipped at scale. Whether Chen's optics expertise ends up in a pair of glasses that anyone actually wears is still an open question. But the direction of talent flow in this industry is no longer ambiguous, and it points one way.
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