Jony Ive has confirmed that he is working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on an AI hardware project. The confirmation came today as part of A profile of Ive on The New York Timesnearly a year after the possibility of a collaboration between Altman and the veteran Apple designer was first reported.
There are few details about the project. Ive is said to have met Altman through Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and the initiative is being funded by Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs’s company Emerson Collective. Times reports that it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year, but makes no mention of Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, who was rumored last year to have invested $1 billion in the project.
The project currently has just 10 employees, but they include Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone. Ive’s company, LoveFrom, is leading the design of the device, the report said. The team is reportedly now working out of a 32,000-square-foot office building in San Francisco, part of a $90 million swath of land Ive has purchased on a single city block.
As for the device itself? Times He says Ive and Altman discussed “how generative AI made it possible to create a new computing device because the technology could do more for users than traditional software” due to its ability to handle complicated requests. Last year, it was rumored to be inspired by touchscreen technology and the original iPhone.
But there appear to be few concrete details. LoveFrom co-founder Marc Newson told the Times that the AI product and when it will hit the market are still being decided.