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Everything over the last 30 years, according to Sir Jony Ive, has led to this moment: a partnership between the iPhone designer and the developer of ChatGPT.
Ive has sold his hardware startup, io, to OpenAI and will take on creative and design leadership across the merged businesses. “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, to this moment,” he says in a video announcing the $6.4bn (£4.8bn) deal.
The main aim will be to move on from Ive’s signature achievement designing Apple’s most successful product, as well as the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch.
The British-born designer has already developed a prototype io device, and one of its users is OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.
Speaking to Ive in a glossy, nine-minute promo heavy with patented Silicon Valley optimism, Altman says of the mystery gadget: “I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
Regardless of the hyperbole, expectations would be vaulting anyway. Ive and Altman are worth backing, given the products they have overseen, but observers say they have set themselves an ambitious goal – one made all the more difficult by the legacy of Ive’s time at Apple.
“It really will have to be amazing to prise people away from today’s screen-based devices,” says Martha Bennett, an analyst at Forrester Research.
Bennett points to the failure of AI hardware devices such as Humane’s defunct AI “pin” – a small, wearable AI assistant that received poor reviews – as an example of how the duo have a “steep hill to climb”. Ive described the Humane pin and the equally small-scale Rabbit R1 device as “very poor products”.
So what was the prototype that Altman was testing? He has told employees that OpenAI plans to build 100m AI “companions” that will be part of users’ everyday life, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.
The product will be “unobtrusive” and capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, the paper report added, and it will be a third core device that someone will have on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone. The device is neither a phone nor a pair of glasses; Altman said Ive had been sceptical about building something to be worn on the body, according to the WSJ.
The video indicated that the fruits of the io deal – a complex arrangement whereby Ive’s LoveFrom design company assumes design and creative oversight of OpenAI and io – will emerge next year.
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Benedict Evans, a tech analyst, says Ive has clearly been brought onboard to answer a key question for OpenAI and Altman: “How do they somehow bootstrap themselves into becoming a major platform company?”
Evans adds: “This is an AI research lab that is running around trying to find solutions that will turn it into the next Apple or Google.”
AI models are essentially becoming commoditised – “It’s not clear how you differentiate them from each other,” says Evans – and now Altman is trying to find hardware to combine with OpenAI’s groundbreaking software.
“OpenAI is trying to do a lot of things at once, and this io deal is part of that. Sam is trying to build the plane while flying it,” he adds.
The Ive-Altman video is shot in Roman Coppola’s Cafe Zoetrope in San Francisco, a pointed reference to a past visionary. Ive and Altman believe that AI will bring them the hardware of the future.
