If Joss Whedon was writing the script for today’s news, right about now someone would be saying “well, that just happened!” OpenAI dug in its back pocket and found enough change for a $6.5-billion-total to entirely buy out Jony Ive’s AI device start-up called “io” (Io).
Here’s how the story goes. After leaving Apple, Jony Ive created a design and creative agency called “LoveFrom,” (yes, including the comma). Two years ago, LoveFrom started working with OpenAI. Roughly a year ago, Ive and other Apple alumni co-founded another unpretentiously named business called Io, this time to create physical devices infused with AI capabilities.
As it turns out, during their collaboration, Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman found plenty of common ground, standing on the shoulders of giants and piles of cash. Smelling a good opportunity, OpenAI previously bought a 23% share in Io. Today, Altman went to the coffers again and took out a cool $5 billion to fully merge Io into the OpenAI conglomerate, with the total value of the deal coming in at around $6.5 billion.
The story is told in detail on the OpenAI website, in a blog post with as much actual humanity as Mark Zuckerberg’s wax visage. The post portrays Ive and Altman as veritable soulmates, and Altman even posted a nine-minute-long video on the subject on his X account, calling Ive “the greatest designer in the world”, and saying he wants to create “AI-powered computers”.
Ive convincing Altman that putting the charging port under the mouse was actually brilliant.
In all seriousness, this move has the potential to create direct and indirect repercussions across the entire tech industry. The blog post doesn’t go into a lot of detail, but OpenAI has been spending copious amounts of cash buying companies of multiple disciplines left and right, and having Apple’s top alumni and associated contacts and co-workers among its ranks has to leave Tim Cook more than a bit rattled.
It’s not out of the question to believe that OpenAI will try to create a direct competitor to Apple (or already is), while having top-notch pedigree in AI, something that Apple has been playing catch-up on in a big way. Moreover, should this endeavor succeed, OpenAI will have a way to sell its wares directly to the consumer and possibly side-step iOS, Android, other operating systems and related platforms.
Altman has already stated that it has a prototype of a device that’s “the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen”, though the road up to here is littered with the corpses of Humane’s AI pin and Rabbit, among other failures. Nevertheless, Apple’s shares felt a 2+% dip right away after hours. When asked for comment, Siri’s only response was that “it doesn’t look like anything to me.”
