Former Apple design master Jony Ive, who played a key role in the creation of the iMac, iPod and iPhone, will be merging his company io with Sam Altman's OpenAI.
Io has been working to make devices that will run OpenAI's popular AI platform, ChatGPT. In a nine-minute video, Mr Ive and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman explained the details behind the merger.
“It’s formed with the mission of figuring out how to create a family of devices that will let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things,” Mr Altman said.
Mr Ive founded io about a year ago with hopes of forming a team of design experts that would create product breakthroughs. Mr Altman said that Mr Ive had given him a prototype for a future device that runs on OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI platform.
“I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will ever see,” Mr Altman said.
Mr Ive said that his son introduced him to ChatGPT several years ago.
“My son told me, 'You've just got to meet Sam',” he recalled.
After an unprecedented string of technology design hits for Apple – which became so influential that he was later knighted in his native Britain – Mr Ive decided to leave the California-based company in 2019.
OpenAI is on top of the wave of the burgeoning AI sector that it quickly helped to make ubiquitous.
Artificial intelligence research dates to the 1960s but recent advances in computer-processing power, coupled with iterations of AI solutions such as ChatGPT in 2022, led to an explosion of interest, investment and start-ups.
Several weeks ago, OpenAI's introduction of a new image-generating feature created so much interest in ChatGPT that its graphics-processing units (GPUs) starting melting.
“The ChatGPT launch 26 months ago was one of the craziest viral moments I'd ever seen, and we added one million users in five days,” Mr Altman wrote at the time. “We added one million users in the last hour.”
Mr Altman is a long-time fan of Apple. In 2008, long before OpenAI, he gave a brief speech at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference in which he showed off his former company, Loopt, and its iPhone offerings.
Acquiring a company from one of Apple's most prized former employees is likely to be deeply personal for the man who has achieved rock star status in the world of AI.
