OpenAI made their largest acquisition to date this week - buying hardware startup io in a staggering $6.5 billion all stock deal. Anyone who’s been following the artificial intelligence race has heard the whispers around town about OpenAI’s aspirations to jump into hardware.
But this news isn’t about the company being acquired. Or even the steep price tag. It’s about who’s behind it: Jony Ive. He’s a legendary Silicon Valley figure who designed so many of the products we use today — the iPhone, iPad, Macbook and Apple Watch.
As Apple’s design chief from 1992 until 2019, Ive was an integral part of the company’s sleek, iconic aesthetic. Ive worked so closely with Steve Jobs for years — Jobs even referred to Ive as his “spiritual partner.”
According to Walter Isaacson’s book, Jobs described Ive as “a wickedly intelligent person in all ways. He understands business concepts, marketing concepts. He picks stuff up just like that, click. He understands what we do at our core better than anyone.”
So the designer of the iPhone and the creator of ChatGPT, Sam Altman, are teaming up to make the next big tech gadget. Imagine a device that not only looks sexy but can also handle complex tasks.
What kind of device are the two cooking up?
According to Ive and Altman, they’ve been working on the first product for two years and plan to unveil it next year. The deal merges io’s team of 55 engineers, researchers and designers with OpenAI. Is it a smartphone? Is it a wearable? We don’t know…yet. Altman said its “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
There’s a huge gap in the AI hardware market. It’ll come down to which big tech player gets it into the hands of billions of people first. What we know is that AI-powered devices, outside of smartphones, haven’t really caught on yet. Meta, Apple and Google have all poured billions into developing the next big AI device that will shape the future.
With this acquisition it’s clear OpenAI wants to go beyond ChatGPT and bypass the traditional hardware players. Who wants to pay Apple a percentage of its fees? Not Altman.
Altman wants to write the next chapter of consumer tech. And without openly saying it, Altman is taking a shot at Apple. The tech giant is supposed to be irreplaceable. So can the man behind the iPhone kill it?
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