Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life

Summary

Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it was acquiring a company called io, an artificial-intelligence-forward product-development firm co-founded, last year, by Jony Ive, the vastly influential designer known for his work with Steve Jobs at Apple. Ive led the designs of the original iMac, the iPad, and the Apple Watch, among other era-defining products. Then, in 2019, he left Apple to start his own design firm called LoveFrom. The news of his move to OpenAI felt something like learning that LeBron James was joining the Miami Heat: Ive had become synonymous with Apple’s success, perhaps second only to Jobs. Now, after a period of independence, he was choosing a new team. The announcement of the deal with OpenAI—for a reported $6.5 billion in OpenAI equity—came via a press release, featuring a rather cuddly portrait of Ive with OpenAI’s C.E.O. and co-founder, Sam Altman (shot by the British fashion photographer Craig McDean) and a faux-casual videotaped interview session between the two at San Francisco’s Cafe Zoetrope. In it, Altman describes “a family of devices that would let people use A.I. to create all sorts of wonderful things,” enabled by “magic intelligence in the cloud.” The symbolism of the partnership was clear: Altman is the new Jobs, and together he and Ive promise to create the next ur-device, a personal technology that will reshape our lives just as the iPhone did. Once it’s ready, they say, they’ll ship a hundred million devices “faster than any company” ever has.We don’t know what it will look like just yet, but Altman swears that it will be “​​the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” Ming-chi Kuo, a respected analyst of Apple’s Chinese manufacturing, posted on X that the product is planned to be “as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle” and that it will have “cameras and microphones for environmental detection.” It might resemble other early A.I. devices announced or launched in the past year, such as Friend, another p...