Jony Ive, who helped design Apple iPhone with Steve Jobs, now wants to surpass it with Open AI founder Sam Altman

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Working with Jobs, he turned a failing Apple into the multitrillion-dollar giant it is today. Ive was involved in everything from high-level concepts such as Apple’s electric car work to designing its packaging and cables.

“When somebody unwrapped that box and took out that cable, they thought, ‘Somebody gave a s— about me’. That’s a spiritual thing,” he said at a recent event.

While press-shy and describing himself as anxious, Ive was widely viewed as the second most important executive at Apple. After Jobs’ death, some saw him as the most important. “He works directly for me,” Jobs had told his biographer, Walter Isaacson. “He has more operational power than anyone else at Apple except me.”

Ive left Apple in 2019 after close to three decades. His design consultancy, LoveFrom, has since worked with clients including Ferrari, and on the King’s Coronation.

His latter years at Apple reportedly left the designer burnt out and increasingly disillusioned with the behemoth’s culture. Speaking at a recent event, he criticised Silicon Valley’s “corporate agendas” of “money and power”, which had replaced a more idealistic goal of “trying to move things forward … creating something better”, although without directly criticising Apple.

In Altman, like Jobs, Ive says he has found someone who aligns with his worldview. “One of the reasons Sam and I clicked, despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same,” he said.

While Ive helped to create the modern consumer technology in billions of pockets around the world, he now believes its time has come. These products are “decades old … It is just common sense to at least think there is something beyond these legacy products”, he said in a video announcing the deal.

‘A family of devices’

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While phones have helped connect billions in new ways, Ive said at one recent event that the “unintended consequences” of his inventions “weighs on me … heavily”.

Shares in Apple fell 2 per cent on the news that OpenAI had acquired IO, a team of about 60 staff, largely ex-Apple, that Ive had built up to work on new designs and technology.

Just what he will work on with OpenAI remains a mystery, though a device is promised for 2026. The Wall Street Journal reported OpenAI hopes to sell 100 million AI devices that can work alongside a laptop or smartphone, sitting in a person’s pocket or on their desk. Altman has suggested these could form part of a subscription to ChatGPT.

This first gadget could be a small “pod” that is likely to augment, rather than replace, the iPhone, the London Telegraph understands. Other smart gadgets could ultimately follow, with Altman promising a “family of devices”.

The vision will spark comparisons to the 2013 science fiction film Her, of which Altman is known to be a fan, in which Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an AI chatbot and interacts with it through a phone-like handset.

The deal will stoke fears that Apple is missing out on the race to develop AI, after its Apple Intelligence product received mixed reviews.

But there will also be plenty of questions as to whether Ive and OpenAI, which has never launched a piece of hardware, can succeed where others have failed.

Humane, a start-up founded by ex-Apple engineers, tried and failed to sell an AI “pin”, a voice-activated badge featuring a projector screen. It was sold to HP and largely shut down. The Rabbit r1, a similar pocket-sized AI puck, was met with dismal reviews. In an interview with Bloomberg, Ive dismissed these early efforts as “very poor products”.

Seeing into the future

Meanwhile, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has been pushing AI-powered glasses, which will one-day incorporate augmented reality, as a vehicle to hook consumers on its Meta AI chatbot.

“Mark Zuckerberg is betting on glasses as the best form factor for delivering AI,” says Ben Wood, a technology analyst at CCS Insight.

With any luck, the Briton will design the defining way of using what Silicon Valley believes is the next great technology to sweep the world: AI.

However, as with other tech-enabled glasses, including Apple’s Vision Pro, take-up has been limited. Wood says it is “unsurprising that there is scepticism about this type of product” given the recent failures of rivals. However, he adds that Ive and Altman’s plans hint at a “very different approach” to that of Meta.

The unusual structure of OpenAI and Ive’s deal has drawn scrutiny from analysts. Richard Windsor, an independent technology analyst, described Ive as “the most expensive consultant in history”. Such an arrangement risks making it “much easier for him to disappear should the relationship sour”. Many will view the valuation OpenAI ascribed to IO as another sign of an AI bubble.

In March, OpenAI raised $US40 billion. It has pledged to build AI superintelligence and huge data centres across the world. While it is now valued at $US300 billion, it is burning through billions of dollars on these projects. Rather than pull back, Altman is doubling down on spending with his new ambition to build a successor to the iPhone.

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Many others have tried and failed. Nothing has made the same splash – or sold in the same numbers – as the iPhone since it was launched in 2007. But, says Wood, “It would be foolish to bet against Jony Ive”.

“Jony did the iPhone, Jony did the MacBook Pro,” Altman said in OpenAI’s launch video. “These are the defining ways people use technology.”

With any luck, the Briton will design the defining way of using what Silicon Valley believes is the next great technology to sweep the world: AI.

The Telegraph, London

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