Openai is fully Obtained IO, a joint venture that last year worked with Jony Ive.
Sam Altman, CEO of IVE and OpenAI, said in a nearly 10-minute video released on Wednesday that Apple’s pioneers’ “creative collective” will “merge with Openai to work more closely with San Francisco’s research, engineering and product teams.” Openai said the acquisition of IO’s equity would be paid $5 billion.
The promotional video includes meditations from the technology from IVE and Altman, set against the backdrop of Golden Hour on the streets of San Francisco, but both never fully share what they are building. “We look forward to sharing our work next year,” the text statement at the end of the video said. Given that the two are focusing on building hardware devices for the AI era, my pedigree on Apple would most likely be a consumer-oriented product.
IO was launched last spring as part of a joint project between IVE design firms Lovefrom and Openai. In the fourth quarter of last year, IO and OpenAI signed a formal agreement for Openai to acquire a 23% stake in IO. Now, Openai is buying the entity directly.
Merge is slightly complicated. The IO team consisted of 55 people before this announcement. Now, it will expand to include IO and OpenAI employees – smart software engineers, physicists, scientists, and “product development and manufacturing experts”, according to a blog post on the OpenAI website. Ive and Loves will manage the creative design process. But I will remain independent and his company’s love will continue to operate as an independent entity, Openai said. The IO team will report to Peter Welinder, vice president of products at OpenAI, who has worked at OpenAI for eight and a half years.
The founding team of IO has major designs. In addition to me, founders include Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, who both worked at Apple. Those who work closely with them say they are well-known to hire people they think have an extraordinary taste.
By proposing IVE, Openai officially embarked on one of the most ambitious AI hardware projects to date. In recent years, many other major tech companies, including Meta and Google, have tried to develop AI-powered devices such as Smartglasses, but the mainstream adoption of the technology is slow and some devices are plagued by glitches.
Humane is another high-profile AI hardware startup founded by former Apple employees, making its debut in late 2023. Reviewers later found that the device (PIN) was susceptible to overheating and many other problems. Less than two years later, humane equipment was pulled from the market, and its operating system software and patents were sold to printer giant HP.
The joint efforts between ALMAN and IVE have been driven by advances in artificial intelligence and the power of computing. “Computers are seeing, thinking and understanding now,” Openai wrote in his blog post.
Altman reportedly has ambition to have hardware beyond the generative AI software his company develops and sells, and since he left Apple in 2019, I seem to have been eager to create new imprints in the design world. “I’m getting more and more feeling that everything I’ve learned over the past 30 years has made me this moment,” I said in the video. “While I feel anxious and excited about the responsibility for the substantive work in the future, I am very grateful for the opportunity to be such an important collaboration.”
