"Seven Luxury Watches for Seven People"... OpenAI Orders Limited-Edition Watches from Vanguart [Luxury Price Story]

[Financial News] OpenAI, the developer of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, has reportedly teamed up with a luxury watch brand to make custom watches worth hundreds of millions of won for a small group of key employees.

Yonhap News Agency reported on the 26th, citing The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), that Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently placed a special order for seven custom watches from Vanguart, a Swiss luxury watch startup. The specially ordered watches were reportedly distributed among key in-house executives.
Vanguart is known as a watch brand that emphasizes rarity, and it is said to have produced fewer than 200 watches since its founding.
The special-order watches were based on the company's flagship Orb model, which starts at $180,000, or about 250 million won. The rotor was engraved with Altman's longtime motto, "Compute is destiny," while the crown bore the word "Scaling." The back of the watch also featured the phrase "if AGI.aligned: deploy," written in line with Python syntax.
Mehmet Koruturk, chairman of Vanguart, explained the design by saying, "It means that AI should be used for peaceful purposes." He added, "We try to capture a subtle sense of respect for people who know where to look."
Separately, OpenAI also collaborated with Tudor, a brand under Swiss luxury watchmaker Rolex, to produce 400 custom watches for other employees. The watches feature the OpenAI logo on the dial and the phrase "Good research takes time" on the back.
Eric Ku, co-founder of the online watch auction platform Loupe This, said, "Tudor watches with logos from major tech companies can fetch up to $10,500, more than twice their retail price, on the secondhand market."

The WSJ reported that, beyond OpenAI, a luxury watch-making and collecting craze is spreading among executives at major Silicon Valley tech companies, including Google Experience Center.
Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, drew attention after wearing a $1.3 million, or about 1.8 billion won, ultra-high-end watch from Swiss top-tier brand F.P. Journe at public events. Altman has also been known to wear a $650,000 watch from Greubel Forsey, an independent high-end watchmaker based in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland.
Georgia Benjamin, an Adobe designer, explained the background behind the luxury watch craze by saying, "Owning a symbolic physical object makes you feel like you're part of an insiders' gathering."
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