Ive And Altman Are Getting Physical

Apple’s legendary product designer Sir Jony Ive, responsible for the iPhone, iPod, MacBook Pro, and Airpods struck off on his own in 2019 to start his own design house LoveFrom. Following the wave of AI LLM breakthroughs he started another AI company in 2024 called IO, which was promptly scooped by ChatGPT’s CEO Sam Altman for 6.4 billion.

In announcing this partnership the Ive and Altman got together for a kinda odd highly produced circlejerk for youtube where they tried to say as little as possible that wasn’t singing the other ones praises. What we did get the impression of was that they were working on something, and it’s gonna be big, but not physically, and not a phone, but useful in a way a phone maybe can’t be?
Things hit a roadbump shortly after the announcement when iyO, a wearable AI tech firm hit IO with a trademark infringement. While it’s not a lot of fun for OpenAI and IO, it’s flushed a lot of information out into the public at the same time as them having to remove all promo material for the new venture.

So what ARE OpenAI and io cooking up? Officially we won’t know for at least another year before it’s public debut, but unofficially we can take some wild guesses. iyO who demoed their in-ear tech to OpenAI and io alleges that the two companies had been researching in-ear devices.

Ive and Altman said they hoped to spin out a family of these devices, and through the design stage have tried out a bunch of different options including “desktop-based and mobile, wireless and wired, wearable and portable” according to the lawyers representing OpenAI.

Altman mentioned in their fawning video together that it “is not an in-ear device, nor a wearable device.”

It’s not designed to be a replacement for smartphones instead sitting in the precarious position of being a “third device”, or what I like to call “pre top-drawer detritus”. It’s supposedly small enough to fit in a pocket or sit on a desk. It will be aware of the user’s surroundings, so presumably it’s packed with all sorts of fun spyware.

“Our intent with this collaboration was, and is, to create products that go beyond traditional products and interfaces,” Altman stated.

There have been other interpretations of AI adjacent tech. Last year was the rocky launch of the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin, which was like the Star Trek Communicator.

“Those were very poor products,” Ive told Bloomberg. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”

In response R1 creator Jesse Lyu said “It’s an honor to get mentioned by Jony Ive and Sam Altman about rabbit and rabbit r1. However, we don’t like to be put side by side with Humane, a company that stopped trying, got acquired, and shut down.”

“…for a small team like rabbit, we don’t have tremendous resources, $6.4 billion, like Jony and Sam have… We’ll see what rabbit can offer by 2026.”

So what will it be? Honestly my best guess is some sort of screenless pebble design. Perhaps with a pager style screen that glows through the shell to give you some form of HUD, otherwise I expect it’d be entirely screenless. Definitely the fact they’ve been so obsessed with competitors ear-tech seems to at least suggest their device will be primarily voice controlled. It’ll probably need online server access to ChatGPT. The easiest approach would be to make it a bluetoothing interface, but I get the feeling Ive wouldn’t be happy with that crutch. Ideally it would have an embedded eSim maybe like the Apple Watch so it could be online independently of anything else. Alternatively they could use a fallback offline locally hosted LLM. This could add some bulk to accommodate hardware requirements. Perhaps it’s a wearable hybrid like a set of airpods with expanded capabilities.

It would need to sit somewhere between that and an Alexa. To my knowledge so far the only wearable tech that has really stuck have been Fitbits, although there is room for the Meta Glasses to see a steady uptake.

To bolster my wild spitballing I’ll couch it all by saying that if Ive falls back on it just being a bluetooth peripheral that’s essentially a paperweight without the aid of a phone then it has failed his own lofty ideal of being a “new ways of thinking expressed in products.”

I look forward to being completely wrong in a year or so when Jony Ive reveals a little cube for you to swallow.

According to Tech Industry Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo on X:

My industry research indicates the following regarding the new AI hardware device from Jony Ive’s collaboration with OpenAI:

1. Mass production is expected to start in 2027.
2. Assembly and shipping will occur outside China to reduce geopolitical risks, with Vietnam currently the likely assembly location.
3. The current prototype is slightly larger than the AI Pin, with a form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle. The design and specifications may change before mass production.
4. One of the intended use cases is wearing the device around the neck.
5. It will have cameras and microphones for environmental detection, with no display functionality.
6. It is expected to connect to smartphones and PCs, utilizing their computing and display capabilities.

In my view, one of OpenAI’s motives for announcing its collaboration with Jony Ive now is likely to shift market focus from recent Google I/O. Google’s ecosystem and AI integration, showcased in the I/O keynotes, pose a challenge that OpenAI currently struggles to address. As a result, OpenAI is leveraging a new narrative to redirect attention.

That said, AI integrated into real-world applications, often termed “physical AI,” is widely recognized as the next critical trend. While the success of the Jony Ive-OpenAI partnership remains uncertain, it clearly aligns with this trend. This partnership also recalls Alan Kay’s well-known adage: “People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.”