335. The Experience

Paul Meade oversaw the Vision Pro.

The Vision Pro was Apple's most expensive consumer product in recent memory. It was a headset. You wore it on your face, and in exchange for the weight and the cost and the battery pack that tethered to your body, you got to work inside a three-dimensional digital environment that looked like your office but was also, technically, not your office. (I am not making this up.) The Vision Pro cost $3,499. The reviews were generally positive. The customers decided, after reflection, that this was not the direction they wanted their faces to go. Apple discontinued it after approximately one year. The category is still out there, somewhere, waiting.

Paul Meade also oversaw Apple's smart glasses project. The smart glasses project is proceeding toward a product. The product has not yet reached consumers. It is in the phase where the product exists and consumer sentiment about it has not yet been formally collected, which is a different situation from the Vision Pro, where it was collected and the consumers reached a conclusion.

He is leaving Apple for OpenAI.

At OpenAI he will work on bringing artificial intelligence into the physical world. This is the project of taking intelligence that performs well inside a screen — answering questions, writing documents, summarizing calls — and introducing it to environments where it must make contact with actual objects, surfaces, and the general unpredictability of things that have weight. This is sometimes called embodied AI. It is sometimes called the hardest part.

Paul Meade has spent several years working on products designed to put computing into the physical world. He knows what it is like to build something that people are supposed to put on their bodies and use in rooms and look at other people while wearing.

He has experience with how that goes.