A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor.
It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
It's been <20y since YouTube was acquired for $1B, which felt like an imaginary valuation at the time, but it was for a company that actually had traction with users.
Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?
Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need: io
One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…
I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.
so, here are my specific predictions
1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)
2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface
3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud
4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object
5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)
7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —
So does openai know how to widen the context window without it taking more money? Otherwise Google wins, again. And this is all boring. Gemini 2.5 pro preview where you can just insert all files you have and actually it doesn't compress and has it in memory is just what you want. All the compression tricks etc really are shit compared. 32k input tokens is a joke now once you tried this.
As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
Buying a company without a product (or anything announced), without a website, with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.
I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.
What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit?
- Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion.
- Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted.
- And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
I have a feeling OpenAI will eventually be looked back on as the company that forced Google to release its internal AI product and then died a slow death.
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
> At io, the group set out to develop, engineer and manufacturer a collection of products for an era of artificial general intelligence — the point when technology achieves humanlike cognitive abilities.
This is the only play for OpenAI. The AI service is going to be commoditized very very quickly and their moat will be gone. They will be doing vertical integration and push into everything. If people complained apple and google looked at apps and copied the functionality themselves what OpenAI will do will be much worse. Also when it took apple and google years to do it, OpenAI will do it very very quickly, in a year most
It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle. What has that company been doing to be worth 6.5 billion?
I am utterly confused. If AGI is around the corner, this means that the economy is going to be destroyed and money are going to lose their meaning. Who is going to buy your AI gadget? Why spend money on that and Windsurf?
No question that Ive is a legend, but I do think the fall of Humane (also ex-Apple) and the challenges at Meta, Apple, and Google in terms of VR/AR adoption (Meta Ray Ban, Apple Vision, Google Glasses and the new thing) are instructive here. The $6.5B almost feels like the largest ever aquihire.
> OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.
Unless OpenAI is going to also buy a robotics company and Ive is there to design the robot exterior, what else would they make aside from some wearable that just runs an LLM with heavy emphasis on the audio/speech modality? I have the feeling whatever it is will be uninspired and a giant let down.
> “I have a growing sense that everything I’ve learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place and to this moment,” Ive said in a joint interview with OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman
Today I read a couple of book reviews in the Economist with Sam Altman as the subject. The books are :
The Optimist. By Keach Hagey
Empire of AI. By Karen Hao
The reviews are positive for both books. The column itself is titled "Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem" and shows a few reasons people have had some problems with his behaviour. One quote from the article is :
"Ms Livingston fired him, but as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, “or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman’s personal projects”."
I am baffled by the photo.
I would have sworn it’s AI, instead apparently it’s a real photo?
As someone who deals with pictures professionally and has experience with editorial photo editing, I am seriously disturbed but this.
OpenAI spinning into consumer hardware is a significant loss of focus for the company.
I can only explain it with them recognizing that their strongest asset is brand mindshare. This is actually really bad for their outlook as AI model pioneers.
Eventually it was going to be the case that AI will spread around. It can't be contained, it's too easy to distill and hence copy from output.
But I admit I didn't expect it to happen that soon. Also I respect Jony Ive, but expect his "AI devices" to all fail in the market. He's an idealist. He needs counterbalance that he currently lacks.
Look at all of these big names that OpenAI is attaching itself to.
Buy "nobody company" from Jony Ive (using stock)
This incessant need to associate themselves with highly known individuals and over the top announcements reminds me of "Theranos" and infamous con artist, Elizabeth Holmes.
Sam Altman sure knows how to sell.
I wonder how much longer he can keep the con going, even though many of the original founders have left. Maybe 2-3 more years of this dog and pony show before it all comes crashing down in the most spectacular way.
After thinking for sometime it seems like even though Sam doesn't have any stake in io, he might have a stake in the Thrive fund that invested in io. Put $50M in a Thrive fund, which is used to invest in io that ultimately gets acquired by OpenAI at a really high valuation.
Joshua from Thrive anyways wanted Sam to have some stake and the numbers being floated around was of the order of $7B. The whole thing seems absurd and makes me trust OpenAI even less.
Given it’s a stock deal the question simply put is does bringing the highest profile technology designer in the world along with his team into OpenAI increase its terminal value by more than ~2%? If so, the acquisition is a success. Discussions of revenues and valuations and egos have little bearing on this question. To me it seems like an easy win on talent alone, let alone optics, network, and impact on future talent and capital conglomeration.
The video was filmed at Francis Ford Coppola's cafe. Worth a visit, the last time I was there they had a machine that printed out stories for you to take home.
Whatever it is, if it’s AR, they won’t have the resources to do it. If they go Humaine’s clip voice assistant/projection, it’s dead on arrival. If they can do AR, it will be at meta Rayban level. What I’m saying is there is a real physical tech constraint where I’ve noticed the top hardware makers are hitting.
There really isn’t too many ways to interface with AI
I remember seeing a device in tech news which was like a Mutalk [0] but without the mouth-piece. I cannot find the device (side: in fact, even to find Mutalk took ChatGPT's help as search-results were all about general noise-cancelling headphones), but if something like that is possible and what Jony Ive's stealth startup is working on, then this acquisition makes sense. Otherwise, if this AI consumer personal device is to be a thing, then I do not expect speaking aloud into a pin is ever going to become a reality (similar to how Google Glasses failed and that consumer AR devices will fail for generations to come).
This is such an obvious jump the shark moment for openAI.
These types of puffery acquisitions, with a former “legend”, announced with such gusto, have never materialized into anything.
You’re not gonna get breakthrough products like this. Breakthrough products just appear unexpectedly, they’re not announced a year or two ahead of time.
OpenAI will pay most of the deal with an inflated evaluation. It could be that Jony wakes up one morning and finds OpenAI back at the ground. Sam is a master hype and inflation. He has cracked the code to generate free money and pays the companies with OpenAI equity.
Sam Altman already has a hardware company "World" - https://world.org/cofounder-letter which works on Orb (a hardware). Not sure if there is any connection between these.
Ive is waaaay overrated. At least he brought a lot of fresh blood into the company. And Microsoft is just terrible with anything design related, so this might be a cool move, but MS is also terrible in acquiring companies and then letting them work.
It's interesting reading through the comments here. Lots of people slating Jony Ive. Is it a newer generation that doesn't know his work or an older generation that's forgotten?
The man has produced some of the greatest design work in the last few decades. Sure there were missteps (particularly in the quest for thinness in the laptop products) but he led design on some of the most iconic products and some of the most widely used products of all time.
iMac G3/4/5. iBook. iPod/Mini/Nano/Shuffle. iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. Not one person or company even comes close to having that kind of influence globally.
I had been considering doing a startup in this space, I thought Humane and rabbit are directionally correct. This kinda makes me want to do it even more, that would be a fun team to compete against.
It's a screenless & buttonless phone. Slightly smaller form factor than regular iphone, with comparatively bigger battery and powerful processing for on-device models.
It is fascinating how design has become the new gold standard in the AI era. It really looks the strongest signals come from taste and design quality and AI is killing other signals.
That is an insane amount to hire Johnny Ive. Just to signal to the market that OpenAI is getting into hardware, what on earth could they be building towards. They’ve been writing some big checks off late, these costs will have to be justified soon enough.
A solution looking for a problem. We already have devices which can access AI with ease. I don't need your proprietary data farming apis in the OS level...
Hiring a prolific designer, won't buy you the next iPhone. In fact, $6b would have been better spent on the supply chain, the manufacturing intelligence in Asia, and the dirty and difficult work of producing hardware. People forget, how much work is actually needed to produce some innovation like this at scale.
I hope it's not just another orb that talks to you. Maybe they're making humanoids, that's all the rage now... I do wonder what they have built! Surely something right?
I don't doubt that Ive can make a product team that will deliver something, but how does something so clearly aware it was going to evoke feelings of Jobs' Apple, end up so cluelessly narcissistic in delivery in such a non Jobs way. Are they infatuated about the product and the experience or what partnering up means to these two men's self-image?
They say they'll design a "fully novel" type of product - what does that mean? If we take them at their word then it rules out glasses, watches, phones, laptops, and headphones. What does that leave? What seems most in line with Johnny Ive's minimalism is necklaces, rings, or pendants. Could we see some kind of AI brooch in 2026?
Classic hacker news Gnosticism making fun of a designer. The idea the iphone software ecosystem had anything to do with its success is humorous. Remember it didn't even have an app store or anyway to run local yet it was a best seller. Keep worshiping code like it doesn't run on hardware, ha.
Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months.
Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.
The ability for a CEO to be a founder of another company and then buy that company with the company he is a CEO of seems incredibly sketchy. See also: bullshit idea that someone can actually run multiple companies, it’s ceo welfare and vanity titles.
Sometimes two collaborators make each other better than either are alone. I get the sense that's how Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were. I've not seen anything Ive has done since be as good as what he did before. Someone has to hold the spike so the other one can swing the hammer. My guess is that's not how this relationship with Altman will work. And that picture is terrifying, please take it down and destroy the camera that took it.
Has nobody learned anything from the Humane saga? I don't get it - if you have something so revolutionary and so great, just release it and let it speak for itself!
Tangent: Did Windsurf actually get acquired by OpenAI? I would have imagined some sort of announcement from OpenAI at the very least? Bloomberg was the one to break that news too, but haven't seen any follow up.
Finally a GPT phone or personal AI mobile device looks to be in the works!
I’m done with iPhone once GPT releases their personal mobile AI device!
*Hmmm being downvoted the 500 million who use GPT daily won’t be excited to ditch iPhone for GPT phone? Love to hear why others think this isn’t a good idea?
OpenAI board: "Should we dilute the company 2% to acquire Jony Ive for the next 10 years? Yes."
Hacker News: "Man these OpenAI folks are idiots."
OpenAI absolutely should be getting in the hardware game; Ive is a mix of status acquisition and unicorn, and is not the only person/team/company you'd need to make a quality hardware product. But on balance I'd pay 2% of every company I ever had any financial engagement with to get Mr. Ive doing its design. I mean srsly.
I don't understand all the pessimism and incredulity about the valuation. This is an acquisition to take on and disrupt Apple.
Ives + Altman is perceived as a viable successor to the Ives + Jobs partnership that made Apple successful.
Apple is weak and doesn't seem capable of innovating anymore, nor do they seem to understand how to build AI into products.
There's an opportunity to build an Apple-sized hardware wearables company with AI at its core, just as Altman built ChatGPT and disrupted the Google-sized search.
A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition. Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs.
The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.
Sam is playing 4D chess here. He needs top-tier talent and design to build the next generation of AI hardware, and this move pulls in both capital and talent. Going after Apple—the king of consumer hardware—makes perfect sense: either OpenAI builds the iPhone killer or forces Apple to make a move. They’ve won the web interface so far, but don’t own an OS or device layer, so this helps solve that long-term strategic gap. And since it’s an all-equity deal, there’s basically no downside—John stays aligned, and OpenAI now has elite software and hardware talent under one roof. Huge value unlock
Sam is playing 4D chess here. He needs top-tier talent and design to build the next generation of AI hardware, and this move pulls in both capital and talent. Going after Apple—the king of consumer hardware—makes perfect sense: either OpenAI builds the iPhone killer or forces Apple to make a move. They’ve won the web interface so far, but don’t own an OS or device layer, so this helps solve that long-term strategic gap. And since it’s an all-equity deal, there’s basically no downside—John stays aligned, and OpenAI now has elite software and hardware talent under one roof. Huge value unlock.
The comments on this article are very interesting. The next major device will definitely be AI-first. Apple is currently trying to jerry-rig AI into their existing product, the iPhone. This has so far not only been a complete failure, but is bound to be a complete failure in the end.
The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's an AI assistant, a friend, another brain. It's not some BS summarizing engine that can't even do simple tasks like copy the name of a song playing on Spotify into Notes.
OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive
(bloomberg.com)818 points by minimaxir 21 May 2025 | 1126 comments
Comments
It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?
One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…
I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.
so, here are my specific predictions
1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)
2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface
3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud
4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object
5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)
7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —
As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.
This industry is amazing.
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
And everyone cringed.
What an extremely weird (and egotistical) thing to say if you're in Altman's position
After Jobs passed he never produced anything of any value, he almost destroyed Macbooks.
I wonder how much of this is downstream from them not being able to convert to a for profit and giving sam a slug of equity
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/openai-reportedly-mulls-bu...
> OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.
How the heck did the price go up 13x?
Ah. What synergy, what serendipity. Right there.
Nice photo by the way — https://d7bnjsbkcwmq2m.archive.is/HgpSJ/945183ffb15e984274fa...
The Optimist. By Keach Hagey Empire of AI. By Karen Hao
The reviews are positive for both books. The column itself is titled "Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem" and shows a few reasons people have had some problems with his behaviour. One quote from the article is :
"Ms Livingston fired him, but as Ms Hagey recounts, he left chaos in his wake. Not only was he overseen by a non-functioning board, he had also used YC equity to help lure people to OpenAI. She says some YC partners saw a potential conflict of interest, “or at least an unseemly leveraging of the YC brand for Altman’s personal projects”."
Sam Altman is a visionary with a trustworthiness problem https://archive.is/oANfs
"Two books tell a similar tale about OpenAI. It is worrying"
Can't think of any maybe im wrong
he must be buying the name or something or just the brains idk
I can only explain it with them recognizing that their strongest asset is brand mindshare. This is actually really bad for their outlook as AI model pioneers.
Eventually it was going to be the case that AI will spread around. It can't be contained, it's too easy to distill and hence copy from output.
But I admit I didn't expect it to happen that soon. Also I respect Jony Ive, but expect his "AI devices" to all fail in the market. He's an idealist. He needs counterbalance that he currently lacks.
Buy "nobody company" from Jony Ive (using stock)
This incessant need to associate themselves with highly known individuals and over the top announcements reminds me of "Theranos" and infamous con artist, Elizabeth Holmes.
Sam Altman sure knows how to sell.
I wonder how much longer he can keep the con going, even though many of the original founders have left. Maybe 2-3 more years of this dog and pony show before it all comes crashing down in the most spectacular way.
There really isn’t too many ways to interface with AI
[0] https://en.shiftall.net/products/mutalk
These types of puffery acquisitions, with a former “legend”, announced with such gusto, have never materialized into anything.
You’re not gonna get breakthrough products like this. Breakthrough products just appear unexpectedly, they’re not announced a year or two ahead of time.
The man has produced some of the greatest design work in the last few decades. Sure there were missteps (particularly in the quest for thinness in the laptop products) but he led design on some of the most iconic products and some of the most widely used products of all time.
iMac G3/4/5. iBook. iPod/Mini/Nano/Shuffle. iPhone. MacBook Air. iPad. Apple Watch. Not one person or company even comes close to having that kind of influence globally.
> Five years to the week after he walked away from the top job designing the iPhone [1]
Sounds to me like OpenAI is going to make it's own consumer device. Maybe designed by the AI itself. The AI Is choosing it's own body?
[1]: https://archive.is/yixNr#selection-615.0-615.81 "After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own" - NYT
"AI utilitarians are in a suicide pact with the U.S. economy"
(attribution: @bencollins.bsky.social)
Am I missing something here! Apart from Windsurf, what else did they acquire?
https://monocle.com/business/can-jony-ive-save-san-francisco...
In hindsight, it might be a cheap acquihire.
Made Mark Cuban a billionaire.
Probably there is a big grey market in OpenAI shares, and this is a similar strategy.
Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months.
Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.
[1] https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1925235156157440438
If it was close at hand, spending precious resources on anything other than pursuing AGI wouldn’t make sense.
I’m done with iPhone once GPT releases their personal mobile AI device!
*Hmmm being downvoted the 500 million who use GPT daily won’t be excited to ditch iPhone for GPT phone? Love to hear why others think this isn’t a good idea?
Hacker News: "Man these OpenAI folks are idiots."
OpenAI absolutely should be getting in the hardware game; Ive is a mix of status acquisition and unicorn, and is not the only person/team/company you'd need to make a quality hardware product. But on balance I'd pay 2% of every company I ever had any financial engagement with to get Mr. Ive doing its design. I mean srsly.
Ives + Altman is perceived as a viable successor to the Ives + Jobs partnership that made Apple successful.
Apple is weak and doesn't seem capable of innovating anymore, nor do they seem to understand how to build AI into products.
There's an opportunity to build an Apple-sized hardware wearables company with AI at its core, just as Altman built ChatGPT and disrupted the Google-sized search.
"Apple-sized" more than justifies a 5B valuation.
Search "io" on Google right now and see what comes up...
The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile. They reminded us of a time when we celebrated human achievement, grateful for new tools that helped us learn, explore and create.
It's probably some form of glasses with ChatGPT on it but obvious glazing, pomp and ceremony of this announcement talking directly to Apple.
Apple has 1 year to respond.
The next Apple will be the one that creates an AI-first device entirely from scratch. AI lies at the core of everything it does. It's an AI assistant, a friend, another brain. It's not some BS summarizing engine that can't even do simple tasks like copy the name of a song playing on Spotify into Notes.
That's what I think Jony Ive envisions.