Mark Gurman and Shirin Ghaffary, reporting for Bloomberg:

OpenAI will acquire the AI device startup co-founded by Apple Inc. veteran Jony Ive in a nearly $6.5 billion all-stock deal, joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware.

The purchase — the largest in OpenAI’s history — will provide the company with a dedicated unit for developing AI-powered devices. Acquiring the secretive startup, named io, also will secure the services of Ive and other former Apple designers who were behind iconic products such as the iPhone.

The letter from Ive and Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, introduces the project beautifully:

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.

The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower, and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering, and product teams in San Francisco.

As io merges with OpenAI, Jony and LoveFrom will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.

Evans Hankey worked as Apple’s head of industrial design for a few years and is responsible for the squared edges of the iPhone 12 and beyond, as well as the beautiful new (2021) MacBook Pro and (2022) MacBook Air designs. I’ve credited her work as the sole impetus for the new gorgeous, functional designs of Apple’s products and have no idea where Apple would be without her. I still have a lot of respect for Ive, too, even if I’ve soured on his designs toward the end of his career at Apple. The iPhone X and iPhone 4 are the most beautiful pieces of consumer technology ever produced, and his other inventions like the first iMac, iPod click wheel, and Digital Crown on the Apple Watch will go down as some of the most important design work in human history. While some of his recent Mac inventions, like the 2016-era MacBooks Pro or the truly terrible Magic Mouse, stemmed from a lack of centralized product direction at Apple, Ive is one of the most talented, legendary designers the world will ever know.

Losing Hankey and Ive to OpenAI, Apple’s second most important competitor, is one of the biggest blows to Tim Cook, its chief executive, in a while. Words cannot explain how insurmountable a loss this is for Apple. But I don’t want to spend the rest of this post belaboring how Apple has gone to hell and Google and OpenAI have dug its grave in a week. This is one of the most exciting product announcements in a while, and it gives me hope for the future of technology. In a world where artificial intelligence poses many dangers to humanity and the internet is filled with uninteresting slop, tech needs someone tasteful again. No person in tech has more taste than Ive, Steve Jobs’ most important protégé and a true artist. I knew this was going to go well as soon as Ive said the Humane Ai Pin and Rabbit R1 were bad products. Here’s a snippet from an interview Ive did with Bloomberg, linked above:

There have been public failures as well, such as the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 personal assistant device. “Those were very poor products,” said Ive, 58. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”

They really were poor products because they tried to replace the smartphone, not augment it. If there’s one person on the planet who truly groks the intersection between great, human-centric design and technology, it’s Ive, and I know he’ll do good work here. Ive and Altman’s announcement video gave no hints about what the two may have cooking up, but I know it’ll be useful, tasteful, and intelligent — three qualities both Humane and Rabbit haven’t thought of putting together. Ive knows slop when he sees it because he’s a designer. He’s not a businessman. The AI industry needs people who have a knack for tasteful design and who can reject slop. Ive knows how to produce technology that augments human creativity in a way no other AI tech founder does.

With Apple out of the equation, I truly believe OpenAI is the last remaining vestige of taste and creativity in Silicon Valley. Microsoft and Google have never been artful companies and have treated creators like garbage for their entire lives. Apple was at the intersection of technology of liberal arts and technology for years, but now it’s too incompetent to consider itself a modern tech company for much longer. (Penny-wise, pound-foolish, I guess.) OpenAI, meanwhile, has some bright minds working for it, but is also headed by a narcissist (Altman) who sees dollar signs everywhere. Ive has one singular focus: good design, and he’s good at making it. We need some excitement in the tech industry these days, and this is the first time I’ve been truly excited about the future of AI in a while.

If you’re feeling drab about the future of technology after seeing “Big Tech” billionaires taking over the government with large language models and using overpowered smartphone autocorrect as a reason to fire thousands of workers, watch the 10-minute video Altman and Ive posted Wednesday afternoon. You won’t regret it.