OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware in $6.5B deal

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple's iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.

OpenAI said it is acquiring io Products, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion.

Ive became renowned for a meticulous design aesthetic that shaped the cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple, which he left in 2019. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997, where the two forged a partnership that would hatch a succession of game-changing products like the iPhone.

The new OpenAI deal now thrusts Ive at the vanguard of AI — a technology driving the biggest industry shift since the iPhone's arrival.

The company hasn't said exactly what product they will be making but expect ''physical AI embodiments'' that bring generative AI chatbot technology out of computer screens into another form, such as through a car, humanoid robot or the AI-powered glasses being developed by competitors Google and Meta, said Gartner analyst Chirag Dekate, adding that it is too early to know for sure.

OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been ''quietly'' collaborating since 2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom.

In a joint letter posted on OpenAI's website Wednesday, Ive and Altman said it ''became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.''

That's when Ive co-founded io, which was incorporated in Delaware in September 2023 and registered in California in April 2024, according to state records. OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.

OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but ''will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.'' Both OpenAI and Ive's design firm are based in San Francisco.

Leading the new io division for OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics research in the startup's early years and more recently has been vice president of its ''new product explorations'' team that delves into hardware, robotics and other early stage research.

Altman, 40, can only hope his still-blossoming partnership with the 58-year-old designer, works out as well as the mind-meld between Jobs and Ive.

When he started his own firm, Ive derived the LoveFrom name from Jobs' observation that one way to hail humanity is by ''making something with a great deal of care and love.''

Ive also chose to base LoveForm in a historic part of San Francisco, located just near bars and cafes that were once frequented by such Beat Generation luminaries as ''On The Road'' author Jack Kerouac and ''Howl'' author Allen Ginsberg.

OpenAI is headquartered about two miles away. Founded nearly a decade ago as a nonprofit research laboratory dedicated to safely building better-than-human AI for humanity's benefit, it remains controlled by a nonprofit board of directors even as Altman, its co-founder, has increasingly pushed it toward commercializing ChatGPT and its other inventions. It's not clear if Altman's collaboration with Ive began before or after Altman's short-lived ouster in November 2023, months after io's Delaware incorporation but before the new business was set up in San Francisco.

Altman earlier this month said OpenAI was abandoning plans to drop its nonprofit governance structure but is pursuing a plan to make changes that would make it easier to access capital and pursue mergers and acquisitions ''and other normal things companies would do."

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O'Brien reported from Providence, Rhode Island.

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