Jony Ive, who is responsible for the look and feel of several iconic Apple products, including the iPhone and the iMac, has confirmed that he is working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on an artificial intelligence-driven hardware project.
Knighted in 2012, the former chief designer of Apple left the tech giant in 2019 to start his own design firm, LoveFrom, but he continued to work on the company’s products till 2022 through a consulting agreement.
Details of the OpenAI project are scant but the venture is being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, which is Laurene Powell Jobs’s (who was married to Steve Jobs) company. According to The New York Times, Ive met Altman for dinner several times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. The project may raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors.
The buzz around AI-driven products hasn’t taken off so far. In the last few months, there have been a number of devices based around generative AI, like the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1, but they have failed to become the “next big thing”. Users don’t seem to want dedicated hardware for AI services when they already have smartphones.
At the moment, the project has 10 employees, including two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone — Tang Tan and Evans Hankey.
The project’s team is working out of a 32,000 square feet building in San Francisco, part of a $90 million stripof real estate that Ive has bought.
Ive’s firm has been responsible for designing the emblem for the coronation of King Charles III and he has also made the Terra Carta Seal, which recognises sustainability efforts from private companies, in partnership with the then Prince of Wales in 2021. LoveFrom also has a creative partnership with Ferrari and Ferrari’s holding company Exor to explore “the business of luxury”.
The 57-year-old has been criticised for preferring form over function and comingup with MacBooks so thinthat the keyboards malfunctioned.
The name for Ive’s company LoveFrom is a nod to Steve Jobs with whom he struck a friendship after the Apple founder returned to the company in 1997.
Jobs told Apple employees in 2007 that one of the ways to express appreciation to humanity is through the act of “making something with a great deal of care and love”.
