OpenAI and Jony Ive Are Reportedly Working On Building the ‘iPhone of AI’

Apple’s Former VP of Industrial Design Jony Ive is working with OpenAI to create something roughly described as the ‘iPhone of artificial intelligence’. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has connected with Jony Ive’s company LoveFrom to develop OpenAI’s first consumer device.

The project is said to be in the early stages of planning but they have received funding of $1 billion from Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son. Despite being in the early stages of the project, the pair have discussed many potential designs and are looking forward to building something that gives a ‘more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI’. The FT reports said that they are taking inspiration from how the iPhone used the touchscreen to transform how we interact with the mobile internet.

The duo is said to be working on giving users a more natural and intuitive way of conversing with AI. Employing ChatGPT on a PC or an iPhone is ideal but that’s not what the devices were explicitly designed for. This project may hypothetically involve hardware embedded with AI. The climax will be creating a way of interacting with computers that is less dependent on the screen.

AI for the last decade has been hyped but recent advancements in Generative AI tools that can create content like text or art, have boosted the interest and funding drastically. This change was led by Open AI with its success with ChatGPT. This also created a need for tech giants like Microsoft and Google to release their AI systems. Amazon also collaborated with Anthropic to bring advancements in their AI systems.

Jony Ive worked with Apple for nearly 30 years and left it in 2019 to start his own company LoveFrom. He made contributions to some of the finest physical designs of devices like the iPhone, iMac, iPad, and other iDevices. Since leaving Apple, working with OpenAI to design hardware embedded with AI will be a noteworthy effort and its success can mark his name in the world of innovation.