The former Apple design manager Jony Ive, who shaped the product design of the iPhone group, changes to Chatgpt developer Openaai. Openai will take over the AI device startup IO from IVE. This and Openai CEO Sam Altman gave this on Wednesday In a joint message known.
As, among other things, The Bloomberg news agency reports, If Openai will take over the start-up for AI devices co-founded by IVE in an almost $ 6.5 billion stock deals and get together with the legendary designer to advance to the hardware area. The transaction is expected for this summer, subject to official permits. According to Bloomberg, the greatest purchase in the history of Openaai will give the company a separate department for the development of AI-controlled devices. By taking over IO, Openaai receives about 55 hardware engineers, software developers and manufacturing experts-a team that is supposed to build up a device family according to Altman and IVE.
According to the almost nine -minute video attached to the announcement, IVE and its design studio LOVEFROM will remain independent and take over the design of Openai and IO, including the software. “I am increasingly feeling that everything I have learned in the past 30 years has led to this place and at that moment,” said Ive in the joint interview with Altman. “It is a relationship and a kind of collaboration that, in my opinion, will produce products and products and products.”
New AI products planned
A year ago there were first rumors about the meeting of Altman and IVE, which later confirmed. Accordingly, Lovefrom took over a design order from Openai for a non-closer AI product. Together they also founded a start-up and collected private funds. At the beginning of April it was said that Openaai was interested in taking over the stealth spin-off of his design company LoveFrome launched by IVE. The goal is a new AI gadget that does not have a screen, it said.
“We are obviously still in the final phase of the AI interactions,” said Altman. “We have not yet found out what the equivalent will be on the graphical user interface, but we will.” However, the new devices are not intended as a replacement for smartphones: “As the smartphone did not replace the laptop, our first product will not replace the smartphone. It is a completely new type of device,” said the Openai CEO.
If it goes to Altman, Openai will create a product at a quality level “that has never existed with consumer hardware”. “AI is such a big leap forward in relation to people’s possibilities that it takes a new type of computer form factor to exploit the maximum potential.”
Smart Glasses as a possibility
The announcement of the cooperation between IVE and Altman comes at a time when tech companies are increasingly trying to incorporate AI into their software and to develop new products based on AI-from intelligent glasses to jewelry to new types of devices. For example, Google has just presented its plans for AI-controlled Smart Glasses on the I/O 2025. Users should send messages to friends, make appointments, request directions via Google Maps or take photos. The Ray-Ban meta glasses with AI function of the US social media group Meta Platform have been a seller for a long time.
What the Openai devices could look like is not yet known. It is likely that the hardware will be designed in this way to support AI applications more efficiently, for example through new user interfaces that are geared towards language or gesture control. “The products we use to connect with an unimaginable technology are decades old,” said IVE in the video. “Therefore, it is only reasonable, at least to think that there is something that goes beyond these old products.”
Influential design icon
Since then, little has become known about IVE and his work. Instead of coming up with his own products as announced, he helped a MET GALA or worked on designing a new lightsaber for “Star Wars: awakening of power”. Last autumn there were reports that Ive developed a new button together with the luxury winter dress manufacturer Moncler.
Last year IVE founded the company IO together with the former Apple employees Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tang. Hankey was a successor to Apple until 2023; Tan, in turn, was responsible for the product design of the iPhone and the Apple Watch until 2024. According to Bloomberg, the aim of IO is to develop and manufacture a number of products for the AI age-a mission that the team will continue at Openaai. Their work will be “a threat to the devices that the designers have developed,” believes Bloomberg, “an additional challenge for Apple, which has fallen back in the field of artificial intelligence behind his colleagues in Silicon Valley”. After the announcement of the collaboration between Openai and IVE, the Apple share in New York on Wednesday was up to 2.3 percent after it had already lost 17 percent this year until the conclusion of the trade.
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