Jony Ive confirms he’s working on a new device with OpenAI
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The confirmation comes in a major New York Times profile about what Ive’s been up to since leaving Apple.
By Alex Cranz, deputy editor and co-host of The Vergecast. She oversaw consumer tech coverage at Gizmodo for five years. Her work has also appeared in the WSJ and Wired.
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Photo by Jerod Harris/Getty Images for Vox Media
A year after multiple publications reported Jony Ive was collaborating with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a hardware project, Ive himself has confirmed it in a profile in the New York Times.
There aren’t a lot of details on the project. Ive reportedly met Altman through Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and the project is being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ company. The New York Times claims it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year, but makes no mention of Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank CEO rumored last year to have invested $1 billion in the project.
The project only has 10 employees currently, but they include Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone. As for the device itself? Last year it was rumored to be inspired by touchscreen technology and the original iPhone, which makes sense given Tan’s and Hankey’s involvement.
There’s still no timeline on when we’ll learn more about this project, but the little information dropped in the New York Times should sound very familiar to anyone following the AI hardware scene over the last year:
Mr. Altman and Mr. Ive talked about how generative A.I. made it possible to create a new computing device because the technology could do more for users than traditional software since it could summarize and prioritize messages, identify and name objects like plants and eventually field complex requests like booking travel.
