Jony Ive joins OpenAI on breakthrough hardware project

He has been working with the company for eighteen months on the frontier of modern hardware design; the standalone AI product.

Citing significant progress already done, Sam Altman says «I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen,» according to The Washington Post.

New generation of computers
OpenAI is now buying Ives design company io for $6.5 billion in stock.

— [We are] excited to try to create a new generation of AI-powered computers, tweets Altman.

They won’t say what the actual product is yet, opting instead for as much stealth as possible out of fears of being copied.

First product to live with
At the same time, they mention other forays into AI-only products, like the Humane pin and the Rabbit R1 as «thoughtless,» «bad products,» according to Bloomberg — so it certainly won’t be something akin to those.

— Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I’ve been able to live with it, and I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen, Altman said in an announcement video from OpenAI.

Ive is an Apple legend
Jony Ive had previously worked thirty years as chief designer for Apple Inc. and was responsible for the designs of iconic products like the original iMac, the iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

He is joined by 55 designers and engineers from the io venture, writes The Verge.

Planning 100 million units
Altman further says they are exploring the manufacturing of 100 million of the bespoke devices, and this they will sell «faster than any company has shipped 100 million of something new before,» according to the Wall Street Journal.

The pair says it won’t be a set of glasses, wont be a phone, or a wearable but an entirely new «family of products» meant as a third device category.

Read more: OpenAI announcement, Wapost notes the difficulty of AI on normal computers, CNBC muses on what this means for Apple, WSJ digs into product details, and overviews by The Verge and TechCrunch