Jony Ive joins forces with OpenAI

iPhone genius eyes new AI hardware

- MIKE ISAAD CADE METZ

The rise of artificial intelligence has profoundly altered the technology world in recent years, upending how software is made, how people search for information, and how images and videos can be generated — all with a few prompts to a chatbot.

What the technology has yet to do, though, is find a preferred form in a physical, everyday gadget. AI largely remains the domain of an app on phones, despite efforts by start-ups and others to move it into devices.

Now OpenAI, the world's leading AI lab, is taking a crack at that riddle.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, said on Wednesday the company was paying $6.5 billion to buy io, a one-year-old start-up founded by Jony Ive, a former top Apple executive who designed the iPhone. The deal, which effectively unites Silicon Valley royalty, is intended to usher in what the two men call "a new family of products" for the age of artificial general intelligence, or AGI, which is shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.

The deal, which is OpenAI's biggest acquisition, will bring in Mr Ive and his team of roughly 55 engineers, designers and researchers. They will assume creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and build hardware that helps people better interact with the technology.

In a joint interview, Mr Ive and Mr Altman declined to say what such devices could look like and how they might work, but they said they hoped to share details next year. Mr Ive, 58, framed the ambitions as galactic, with the aim of creating "amazing products that elevate humanity."

"We've been waiting for the next big thing for 20 years," Mr Altman, 40, added. "We want to bring people something beyond the legacy products we've been using for so long.