So former Apple design chief Jony Ive simply offered IO, his stealth AI {hardware} startup, to OpenAI earlier than anybody knew it existed. The transfer was introduced with a weird video and a black-and-white picture of Jony and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wanting like they requested the latter’s GPT picture generator to place them on Simon and Garfunkel’s Bookends album cowl.
Instantly, there have been headlines predicting hazard for Ive’s former employer. Apple’s iPhones and MacBooks are about to get replaced by a revolutionary AI gadget, we’re informed. However do not blame me for being skeptical. After final 12 months’s flurry of ‘various’ {hardware}, we had been able to declare the AI gadget era the shortest-lived fad since NFTs till this week. Can IO actually change issues?
In case you missed the information, OpenAI is forking out an estimated $6.5 billion in inventory to purchase IO, which was based by Ive together with fellow Apple alumni Evans Hankey (his successor as Apple’s head of design), Tang Tan (the previous head of iPhone and Apple Watch design) and Scott Cannon.
Round 55 employees will head to OpenAI. Ive himself will not be amongst them, however his design firm, LoveFrom, will work solely for OpenAI dealing with its design, together with software program.
If anybody could make an AI gadget successful, it needs to be the group of {hardware} and software program engineers, technologists, physicists and product design specialists that IO has assembled. We’re informed the primary IO gadget will launch in late 2026. However what’s going to that appear like?
The polished nine-minute launch video sees Sam and Jony head to a San Francisco cafe to inform the barista about their bromance and their love for the town and little or no about what they’re engaged on. That is led to frenzied hypothesis about what IO will make.
The Wall Street Journal cites an inside name at OpenAI during which the AI gadget is described as pocket-sized, screenless, conscious of a consumer’s life and environment and “not a pair of sensible glasses”.
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Altman has mentioned the gadget is one thing completely new and “the best piece of expertise that the world can have ever seen.” That is a declare as daring as Elon Musk‘s suggestion that the Cybertruck would also be a boat.
Sam’s in all probability proper that AI requires a rethink of {hardware}, however the hype makes me doubtful. Apple would not really feel the necessity to tease experimental merchandise. It retains them beneath wraps. Even then, it nonetheless generally will get issues fallacious – Apple Intelligence spectacularly over promised and was rolled out earlier than it was prepared.
The Rabbit R1 that our reviewer needed to like (Picture credit score: Future)
The generative AI revolution impressed product designers to foretell {that a} new type of radically completely different gadget would change the smartphones in our pockets and the laptops in our luggage. The issue is that to this point they’ve’t labored effectively, and folks have not seen a necessity for them.
We actually needed to love the Rabbit R1, however our verdict in our review was that it was gimmicky gadget. It is nonetheless going, however I’ve not met anybody who is not a tech journalist who;s used one.
Then there was the Humane AI Pin, a small, voice-controlled AI gadget that was supposed to have the ability to reply questions however typically obtained the solutions fallacious. That was additionally the kid of former Apple staff. The corporate offered out to HP and was shut down lower than a 12 months after launch, leaving its server-dependent units virtually ineffective.
The short-lived Humane Ai Pin wasn’t precisely discreet (Picture credit score: Humane)
Jony Ive is clearly conscious of those flops. His argument in an interview with Bloomberg is that these had been merely “very poor merchandise” and that “there was an absence of recent methods of considering”.
A extra promising space of AI {hardware} exploration has been sensible glasses just like the Ray-Ban Meta collaboration, Good Labs’ Body and, introduced simply this week, Google’s upcoming Android XR sensible glasses to be made by eyewear manufacturers Warby Parker and Light Monster. Apple can also be rumoured to be engaged on Siri sensible glasses.
Then there are residence assistants, units like LG’s annoyingly cute robot dog, AKA the Self-Driving AI Residence Hub, and the SenseCAP Watcher autonomous AI assistant, which appears like a Tamagotchi however can flip your TV and lights off if you go to sleep.
IO’s gadget sounds prefer it may very well be a container for a extra highly effective agentic AI that accompanies you all through the day, presumably with voice because the UI. However smartphones can even ship AI help through voice UI, whereas additionally being telephones (and cameras and leisure units, and the checklist goes on). A brand new kind issue would want to offer some bodily benefit.
OpenAI actually needs to be Apple, and Sam actually needs to be the brand new Steve Jobs, which may be why he is introduced in Jony Ive. However when Jony designed the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone, he utilized exquisitely easy user-friendly design to core applied sciences that already labored. Regardless of how nice IO’s product is, the AI behind it must be as much as the job. Contemplating that AI fashions can nonetheless get issues so terribly fallacious, it might simply be one other flop that involves market earlier than it is prepared.
