Since founding OpenAI in 2015, Sam Altman has spent many days thinking that the company’s generative ai products need a new type of device to be successful. Since he left Apple in 2019, Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, iPod and MacBook Air, has been considering what the next big computing device could be.
Now, the two men and their companies are teaming up to develop a device that would succeed the smartphone and deliver the benefits of ai in a new form factor, unrestricted by the rectangular screen that has been the dominant computing tool of the last decade, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The project was described as preliminary, but Altman and Ive developed some initial concepts and sought up to $1 billion in financing from SoftBank, the Japanese technology investor led by Masayoshi Son, the people said. With SoftBank’s support, the two men could tap into the semiconductor expertise of Arm, the British chip design company that Son bought in 2016 and recently went public.
The business structure behind the project is still unclear. Altman’s company, OpenAI, is an artificial intelligence research lab in San Francisco that has about 400 researchers, engineers and support staff, while Ive’s San Francisco design firm, LoveFrom, has about three dozen industrial and software designers, as well as some engineers.
The talks have been going on for much of this year and were previously reported by ai-hardware-project?utm_content=article_push&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=AB_post&utm_term=AB_post” title=”” rel=”noopener noreferrer” target=”_blank”>Informationa technology publication, and financial time.
The partnership speaks to how generative ai is changing the status quo in Silicon Valley. Since the introduction of OpenAI’s online chatbot, ChatGPT, late last year, companies have been scrambling to reinvent their businesses and harness its power to answer questions, write emails, presentations and poetry, and even generate computer code.
Many technology executives believe that technology has the power to introduce a new paradigm in computing that they call “ambient computing.” Instead of typing on smartphones and taking photos, they imagine a future device in the form of something as simple as a pendant or glasses that can process the world in real time, using a sophisticated virtual assistant capable of answering questions and processing images.
Altman had previously invested in a company pursuing that vision called Humane, which was founded by former Apple employees Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno. They plan to launch their device, which they classify as a “disappearing computer”, later this year.
One reason Altman may be determined to develop his own device is to prevent OpenAI from being dependent on Apple or Google’s Android for distribution. Relying on other platforms has challenged tech giants such as Facebook and Amazon because Apple and Google take a cut of sales on their platforms. Apple has also introduced privacy limits, which reduce advertising sales.
But the path to creating new hardware devices is littered with failures. Amazon and Facebook attempted to develop their own smartphones and abandoned their efforts after failing to gain traction.
Few in Silicon Valley have a better track record in device development than Ive. He was the driving force behind the company’s development of the Apple Watch, the only major new device the company has introduced since the death of Steve Jobs in 2011. In 2019, Ive left the company to start LoveFrom, but signed a contract of several years. to continue working with Apple.
Last year, Ive and Apple agreed to stop working together. In negotiating the end of their working relationship, Apple and Ive agreed that there would be no limits on the products it could develop in the future, according to two people familiar with the matter.
An Apple spokeswoman declined to comment.
