(AI)
Analysis
iPhone
design guru and OpenAI chief promise an AI device revolution
Dan Milmo
Global
technology editor
Sam Altman
and Jony Ive say mystery product created by their partnership will be the
coolest thing ever
Thu 22 May
2025 19.17 BST
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.
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.
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