OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, former Apple design chief Jony Ive and SoftBank Group boss Masayoshi Son reportedly are in talks to create the "iPhone of artificial intelligence."
Sources told the Financial Times that Altman, who heads the well-funded San Francisco-based AI startup, has chosen Ive's creative agency LoveFrom to help develop the company's first consumer device. The Information previously reported on these discussions.
Ive founded LoveFrom in 2019 after he left Cupertino-based Apple with his friend and long-time collaborator Marc Newson. The company has offices in San Francisco and London.
According to the FT, Altman and Ive have met several times over the past year to discuss the project with their goal of creating "a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI, in the way that the iPhone’s innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass-market potential of the mobile internet."
Softbank's Son has been in talks with OpenAI following the successful initial public offering of Arm Ltd., the U.K.-based microchip design company that has its U.S. headquarters in San Jose. Softbank has a 90% ownership of Arm. At present, OpenAI is in a partnership with Softbank helping Japan-based companies develop generative AI products like chatbots.
Ive had been with Apple for 27 years, spending 22 of those years as the company's design head. He is responsible for overseeing the design of everything from the iMac to the iPod, iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and the Apple Watch.
This would not be Altman's first foray into hardware. He has invested in Humane, the San Francisco-based tech hardware design company that recently debuted its artificial intelligence-driven wearable device, the Ai Pin.
Humane was co-founded by former Apple executives Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno in 2017, and this past April, Chaudhri demonstrated the company's "disappearing computer" at the TED2023 Talk in Vancouver.
"Our Ai Pin presents an opportunity for people to take AI with them everywhere and to unlock a new era of personal mobile computing which is seamless, screenless and sensing," Chaudhri and Bongiorno said in a joint statement.
Humane describes Ai Pin as a "connected and intelligent clothing-based wearable device (that) uses a range of sensors that enable contextual and ambient compute interactions."
According to the Times, OpenAI sees the new device as "an opportunity to create a way of interacting with computers that is less reliant on screens."
While no agreements have been signed, the discussion are said to be serious. OpenAI, SoftBank, and LoveFrom declined comment to the Times.
