OpenAI has bought Glass Imaging, a startup whose software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to improve smartphone photographs, in a deal reportedly worth more than $300 million.
The purchase was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, and neither company has confirmed it publicly.
Glass Imaging was founded in 2019 by Ziv Attar and Tom Bishop, two former Apple engineers who led the team behind the iPhone's Portrait Mode.
Its technology, called GlassAI, aims to lift phone-camera images towards the quality of a full-sized, professional camera.
Software edits in real-time
Rather than editing a photo after it is taken, the software works at the moment the shutter fires.
It runs the raw output of a particular camera and lens through neural networks trained on that exact hardware, cleaning up noise and detail in a single pass.
The company has stressed that its system does not invent detail, unlike tools that generate plausible-looking pixels, a distinction that matters if the images are later fed to an AI model.
The technology is already in use, powering zoom photography on Honor's 600 series phones.
The price is roughly ten times the $30 million or so Glass Imaging had raised from investors before the sale.
Beyond the LLM
For OpenAI, the deal deepens a costly move beyond software and into consumer devices.
Last year it paid $6.5 billion for io, the hardware startup co-founded by the former Apple designer Jony Ive, and it is reported to be working on a screenless pocket gadget.
Cameras could prove central to those plans, giving future AI devices a way to see and make sense of the world around them.
The acquisition also comes as OpenAI prepares for a stock market flotation, which reports suggest has slipped to 2027 at the earliest.
