Rumors have been circulating since last year, but now Jony Ive has confirmed that he is indeed working on an AI product with OpenAI’s Sam Altman.
Details are scarce, but Ive has told the press that his company, LoveFrom, is leading the design on the product and that OpenAI will build it.
Ive founded his design company following his shock departure from Apple, where he was the most lauded Chief Design Officer, and there are reportedly ten people from his company working on this project.
Cardboard Boxes of Prototypes
An interview with The New York Times has given a tantalizing insight into what is going on behind the scenes at LoveFrom’s offices in San Francisco.
We do know that former Apple designers, Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, are both on board. The article describes the duo moving between desks, “topped by papers and cardboard boxes with the earliest ideas for a product that uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.”
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Generative AI in a “Computing Device”
Ive and Altman were apparently inspired by the idea of “how generative AI made it possible to create a new computing device because the technology could do more for users than traditional software,” says The NY Times.
The Verge adds touchscreen technology and the original iPhone have also been thrown into the melting pot of inspirations.
The Project’s Funding
News reports suggest that the funding for the project has apparently come from Ive himself and Laurene Powell Jobs’ company, the Emerson Collective. The NY Times says that there is a drive to raise $1 billion for the development by the end of the year. However, Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank CEO who was said by The Verge to have invested $1 billion in the project gets no mention in this latest story.
Engadget adds that there is no timeline as yet for this product nor more information as to what it will look like and what market it is designed for. However, in an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event in 2023, Altman told journalist Joanna Stern that he didn’t think AI devices would ever eclipse smartphones.
“Smartphones are great. I have no interest in trying to go compete with a smartphone. It’s a phenomenal thing at what it does. But I think it’s well worth the effort of talking about or thinking about what we can make now that before we had computers that could think, or computers that could understand whatever you wanna call, was not possible. And if the answer is nothing, it would be a little bit disappointing.”
