OpenAI buys former Apple design chief Jony Ive's secret startup, io ...
TechOpenAI, the company behind popular chatbot ChatGPT, will acquire former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s hardware start-up ‘io’ in a $6.5 billion deal. The largest purchase in OpenAI’s history will give the company a dedicated section for coming up with AI powered devices. Bringing Ive’s secretive startup under the OpenAI roof also entails the designer’s expertise as well as former Apple designers who have been behind products such as the iPhone.
Expertise and Collaboration
“I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said in a statement. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said: “What it means to use technology can change in a profound way.” Ive and Altman have not announced the products that will come to the market in the coming years but it will bring about a “new family of products” for the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, meaning a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.
Apple Connection and Expansion
Ive left Apple in 2019 after being there for almost three decades during which he shared a warm friendship with co-founder Steve Jobs. He oversaw the rollout of iPod, iPhone, MacBook and Apple Watch. Open AI, in fact, has a partnership with Apple, which integrated ChatGPT into its voice assistant and writing tools in December as part of Apple Intelligence.
Innovation and Investment
OpenAI has been recently valued at $300 billion after a funding round led by SoftBank. The news will put the company ahead in the generative AI race, where competitors including Google, Anthropic and Elon Musk’s xAI are investing heavily. OpenAI has hired the former head of Meta’s Orion augmented reality glasses initiative in November to lead its robotics and consumer hardware efforts. Also, last year OpenAI invested in Physical Intelligence, a robot startup based in San Francisco, which raised $400 million at a $2.4 billion post-money valuation.
Future Outlook
As part of the deal, Ive and his design studio, LoveFrom, will remain independent and continue to work on projects separate from OpenAI. Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, who also founded io with Ive, will become employees, reporting to Peter Welinder, a vice-president of product, who will oversee the io division.
