Wild news just broke: the company Sam Altman and Jony Ive started to build AI-based hardware has been purchased for a cool $6.5 billion, as Mike Isaac and Cade Metz report:
The deal, which is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition, will bring in Mr. Ive and his team of roughly 55 engineers, designers and researchers. They will assume creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and build hardware that helps people better interact with the technology.
In a joint interview, Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman declined to say what such devices could look like and how they might work, but they said they hoped to share details next year. Mr. Ive, 58, framed the ambitions as galactic, with the aim of creating “amazing products that elevate humanity.”
“We’ve been waiting for the next big thing for 20 years,” Mr. Altman, 40, added. “We want to bring people something beyond the legacy products we’ve been using for so long.”
In their announcement post, the pair write:
Two years ago, Jony Ive and the creative collective LoveFrom, quietly began collaborating with Sam Altman and the team at OpenAI.
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.
It became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company. And so, one year ago, Jony founded io with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan.
We gathered together the best hardware and software engineers, the best technologists, physicists, scientists, researchers and experts in product development and manufacturing. Many of us have worked closely for decades.
Through this deal, LoveFrom “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”
I have no idea what will come out of this, but it’s going to be fun to watch.