AI comes for your phones-which you know now and maybe you’ve already experienced it for yourself in the form of Apple Intelligence or Google Gemini.
But Openai, a chatgpt manufacturer and perhaps the biggest name of AI software and services at the moment, makes a different bet. He looks beyond the traditional smartphone and thinks about how AI could completely reinvent our devices.
On Wednesday, the company announced that it bought the startup of the Jony Ive apparatus for $ 6.5 billion. Together, IVE and Altman build something new – a device that is not like everything we have before, with AI in its heart.
“It has become clear that our ambitions to develop, engineering and manufacturing a new family of products have demanded a whole new business,” the couple said in a statement on their employment relationship. “The IO team, focused on the development of products that inspire, empower and allow, will now merge with OPENAI to work more intimately with research, engineering and products teams in San Francisco.”
IVE is the Apple Designer visionary veteran, who, with Steve Jobs, has created the iPhone, as well as a long list of Apple devices. Now he has turned his attention to the creation of a new category of devices, which has clearly stung the interest of Altman. The IVE startup would have worked on a “phone without screen” – although other reports suggest that it is actually not a phone at all.
Rumors of this mysterious AI device has been circulating for months, but IVE and Altman keep a tight lid on details, fearing that a competitor can try to beat them on the market.
So, for the moment, we will just have to imagine.
The obvious existing point of comparison is a human AI pin, an AI specific device designed to be worn with your collar. He was launched with a fanfare in February 2024, but turned out to be a spectacular failure, creating a lasting air of pessimism around the idea of AI’s devices.
“It is not surprising that there is skepticism about this type of product, in particular in the context of the large-scale failure of human AI, which captured the imagination of technology enthusiasts, including me, but turned out to be a classic example of too promising and sub-vraise,” said Ben Wood, chief analyst at CCS Insight.
The combination of IVE and Altman is however full of potential. “It would be stupid to bet against Jony Ive, given its remarkable history of delivery of products that disrupt a market,” said Wood.
“I have the feeling more and more than anything I have learned in the past 30 years led me at that time,” said IVE in a YouTube video in which the couple talks about their friendship.
Their challenge, explains Thoman Husson, main vice-president at Forrester, “is not only to use AI to improve existing tasks, but to invent new products and experiences”.
That said, OpenAi’s ambitions for its AI aircraft are that it is able to send 100 million units – a daring bet for a software company entering the hardware space for the first time, without pre -established supply chain.
“Jony Ive is an exceptional designer, but smartphones (and material) are a volume game on the scale and the scope,” said Husson. “I think Apple is always better placed to win this marathon race.”
A laptop? Glasses? A phone? Maybe not
In the absence of any substantial index or index, we remain for the moment in the dark about what this first OpenAi material will look like, what it will work and how it will be in our lives.
There have been speculation, largely based on the assertions made by Apple Reliable analyst Ming Chi Kuo, that the Openai apparatus will be portable. In an article on social networks, Kuo said that the IO product had been designed to be worn around the neck and was “as compact and elegant as an iPod shuffle”.
This would indicate that Altman and Ive adopt a different approach from Meta, which has done everything on smart glasses. The meta-PDG, Mark Zuckerberg, said that glasses are the ultimate AI device, due to their ability to receive and provide information near your eyes and ears.
But we must also be prepared for the possibility that the Altman and Ive apparatus is not at all a laptop. According to the Wall Street Journal, Altman said that I act was skeptical about the idea of AI portable devices, which makes it unlikely to kiss them as part of this project.
Citing a briefing given by Altman to the employees to open, the WSJ reports that the device “will be discreet, capable of resting in his pocket or on his desk, and will be a third basic device that a person would put on a desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.”
It is curious to see the phone without an OpenAi screen being discussed in this way, almost as if it was resting in the specific family of Apple products. The WSJ said that Altman is considering in the long term “a family of devices”, which will be defined by what I have described as “a new design movement”.
Maybe the only thing we sure of this product are sure that it will not be delivered with a screen. Altman criticized the time we spend watching screens-but is there room on the market of devices that keep us away from our screens? “With the exception of smart watches, no new product category has emerged from the smartphone,” said Husson. “There is room for disturbances and innovation.”
This non -cell, not portable currently only exists as a third amorphous thing – and will probably do the trick for a while. Continue to check more rumors and updates, which we will add because we will get more information on the type of device to govern our lives in the near future, just like the smartphone today.
