Apple’s longtime Vision Pro hardware chief, who was promoted last year to lead the company’s broader headsets and smart glasses hardware group, has left to join OpenAI.

First reported by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Paul Meade has just left Apple and will now work on hardware at OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.

Meade joined Apple in 2010, where he started as a key manager for the iPad, and in 2012 he became the head of iPhone program management. In 2017 he joined the Technology Development Group (TDG), Apple's A-team working on virtual and augmented reality devices, and by 2019 he was leading hardware engineering for the headset.

By the Vision Pro launch (after which the TDG was renamed to Vision Products Group), Gurman's reporting described Meade as the top lieutenant of Mike Rockwell, who led the group and acted as its public face during Vision Pro's announcement. Under Rockwell, Meade was the key figure who got the complex and groundbreaking Vision Pro hardware ready to ship.

Last year, Meade's responsibilities became even greater. Apple moved Mike Rockwell out of the VPG to lead Siri, replacing the AI assistant's former chief in a "rare shake-up" after his failures left the company far behind competitors in the AI race. Rockwell took the visionOS group with him, bringing it into Apple's regular structure, while Meade remained to lead the hardware development of future Vision headsets – and smart glasses.

As many reports have indicated, over the past few years Apple has been strongly prioritizing shipping smart glasses over future Vision headsets, and Meade was the key figure leading work on the Apple Glasses.

Expected to ship next year, Gurman's previous reports suggest Apple Glasses will be displayless glasses, like most of Meta's glasses, with cameras, speakers, microphones, and an Apple chipset based on the S-series used in Apple Watches. The product would be used for phone calls, music playback, live translations, turn-by-turn directions, and multimodal AI, similar to Ray-Ban Meta. To distinguish from Meta's glasses, according to Gurman, Apple plans to use "high-end materials" and have two oval-shaped cameras, one for high-quality image and video capture, and the other for computer vision.

At OpenAI, Meade may be working on something very similar.

While CEO Sam Altman publicly stated that he didn't like smart glasses, last year The Information reported that OpenAI had at least "considered" the form factor.

Meade may have a more general hardware role at OpenAI though, and reports suggest its first hardware won't be a wearable at all. Instead, if the reports are to be believed, it will be a screenless, pocket-sized, contextually aware AI companion, intended to sit somewhere between a phone, smart speaker, and ambient AI assistant.