There is now a touch of the late Steve Jobs in OpenAI. The ChatGPT maker has acquired former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s secretive hardware startup, io, for $6.5 billion.
Billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs earlier backed io through her firm, the Emerson Collective. Steve, the co-founder of Apple, used to call Ive his “spiritual partner”.
OpenAI has announced that the io team will be “focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable” and will work with the “research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco”.
Rumours of Ive working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have been in the air for more than a year, this newspaper had earlier reported.
The famed British designer spent over two decades at Apple designing many products, including the iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and the iPod. He also designed the official coronation emblem for King Charles III.
Ive left Apple in 2019 to co-found the design company, LoveFrom. At first, Ive’s former and new companies decided to collaborate but they never released a product together. The consulting agreement ended in 2022.
The largest purchase in OpenAI’s history will give it a dedicated section for coming up with AI-powered devices. Altman said in a statement: “What it means to use technology can change in a profound way.”
Ive and Altman are expected to bring a “new family of products” for the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, meaning a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.
Despite taking time over product design, Ive’s work is now considered the stuff of history books. The acquisition is coming at a time when Apple is rejigging its artificial intelligence operations to make it advanced, going toe to toe with those of OpenAI, Perplexity and xAI (Elon Musk’s company).
The news of the acquisition comes a couple of days after Google hosted its annual developer conference where it promised better AI experience. Apple is about to present its annual developer shindig on June 9.
The deal involves OpenAI paying $5 billion in equity for io while the balance of the $6.5 billion comes from a partnership reached in the fourth quarter of last year that involved OpenAI acquiring a 23 per cent stake in io.
OpenAI also has a partnership with Apple, which integrated ChatGPT into its voice assistant and writing tools late last year as part of Apple Intelligence.
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. Altman hired Caitlin “CK” Kalinowski, the former head of Meta’s Orion augmented reality glasses initiative, in November to lead its robotics and consumer hardware efforts.
The multi-billion-dollar deal ensures that Ive’s design studio, LoveFrom, remains independent and will continue to work on projects separate from OpenAI.
Ive recently told an audience he found it encouraging that “it’s very rare for there to be a discussion about AI, and there not to be the appropriate concerns about safety”.