Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. It comes after the company bought io, a hardware start-up Ive founded with fellow Apple alumni Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan in 2024. The long-term plan was seemingly always to merge with OpenAI. The deal is reported to be worth billion, and although Ive will not join OpenAI himself, his LoveFrom studio will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” Bloomberg reports. The first products are expected to launch in 2026, although there are no details yet as to what they will be. “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment,” Ive said. “While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be part of such an important collaboration.” A statement posted on the OpenAI website said that founder Sam Altman started working with LoveFrom – co-founded by Ive, Marc Newson and Peter Saville – two years ago. “Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs,” the statement says. “The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.” “I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this moment.” This led to the realisation that OpenAI’s “ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company” and this led to the creation of io. “AI is an incredible technology, but great tools require work at the intersection of technology, design, and understanding people and the world,” Altman said. “No-one can do this like Jony and his team; the amount of care they put into every aspect of the process is extraordinary. “What it means to use technology can change in a profound way. I hope we can bring some of the delight, wonder and creative spirit that I first felt using an Apple Computer 30 years ago.” OpenAI also released a ten-minute video announcing the new partnership. In the film, Altman says he believes, “they have an opportunity to completely re-imagine what it means to use a computer.” io’s team of hardware and software engineers, physicists, researchers and manufacturing experts have already produced the first prototype. Altman says Ive called it “the best work he had ever done” while Altman thinks it will be “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” So far, AI-enabled products like the Rabbit R1 companion and the Humane AI Pin have been underwhelming – tech blogger Marques Brownlee called the latter, “the worst product I’ve ever reviewed.” But Altman is clearly confident that their products will buck this trend. In the film, Ive points out that the hardware people use to work with AI comes from a different era. “The products that we are using to connect us to unimaginable technology, they’re decades old,” he says. “And so it’s just common sense to at least think, surely there’s something beyond these legacy products.” Altman agrees. “I think this technology deserves something so much better,” he says. When he appeared on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs programme in February, Ive said that society needed “healthy discussions” about AI and in particular “the rate of change” which he feared was not yet being fully grasped. In the same interview, he also admitted that he was troubled by the iPhone’s legacy. “The nature of innovation is there will be unpredicted consequences,” he told host Lauren Laverne. “I celebrate, and am encouraged by, the very positive contribution, the empowerment and the liberty it has provided to so many people, in so many ways.” And while what he calls “the not-so-positive consequences” were unintended, “that doesn’t matter relative to how I feel responsible,” Ive said. “That weighs, and is a contributor to decisions that I have made since, and decisions I am making in the future.” In the OpenAI film, Altman says the pair bonded over “shared values about what technology should be, when technology’s been really good, when it’s gone wrong.” “Our motivations and values are completely the same,” Ive adds. Ive also has previous experience working with a visionary but controversial founder, in Steve Jobs. In a review of tech journalist Karen Hao’s new book, Empire of AI: Inside the Reckless Race for Total Domination, The Guardian described Altman as, “depending how you view him, the villain who has put humanity on the path to mass extinction, or the visionary utopian who will bring us cures for diseases and a revolution in how we work.” Speaking on Desert Island Discs, Ive complained about the “absurd anecdotes and stories” about Jobs and his leadership style, which Ive insisted had been taken out of context. #sir #jony #ive #take #over