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.
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.
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
This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function.
More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.
Jobs has been dead for almost 15 years, he's already had plenty of time to prove himself. By the time he left Apple he was known for his obsession with thinness at the cost of function (if not straight up ruining the product), such as that stupid keyboard design from the late 2010s that sucked to type on, had failure rates comparable to the Xbox 360's RRoD, and was somewhere in the ballpark of $700 to repair because the ridiculous thin construction didn't allow for individual keys to be replaced.
Ive designed bathroom fixtures before Apple and had been parked at Apple making the dumbest looking computers you can image for a very long time until my Dad's lifelong coworker brought Steve back --something I am on record telling people would be the only thing that would save Apple's arse (usually adding that Hell would freeze over before that happened). When Steve returned, he found all they had left was an ability to make laptops and so, the race was on to surround them with fixtures..enter his old pal Jony Ive. In the time since, things got a bit out of hand (pun intended) with the Vision Pro, he's moved on and Tim Apple figured out a way to get all the R&D money back...but
did Ive just land $6B+ for incarnating "Dr. Theopolis"?
Why does Ive need to be churning out continuous hits? There is no shame in quitting while ahead, or considering your previous success to be a tough act to follow.
I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head.
But I guess ego keeps these people going.
I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that Ive probably had to compromise a lot with Steve at the helm. It is generally regarded that (laptops especially) Apple hardware went to form over function when Ive got total control and when Apple finally reverted his vision was sidelined.
If he has an ego, he probably really wants to have something is a Magnus Opus he can claim. It'll be interesting because good design is always a dance with other stakeholders. You see this with architects and other "designers" who sometimes go to far into art and forget that buildings do need to be used.
Apple laptops were good before and after his reign of mediocrity. The butterfly keyboard and the Touch Bar were both terrible and I'm glad they're gone.
The worst part about the butterfly keyboard was that keys would stop working and fixing it would cost the same as a new laptop. I guess that's what you sacrifice when you design the laptop as thin as Ive envisioned.
good designers are obsessed with how things are used. the others are platonically wanking.
I think having a founder stay on and lead, well after they are financially independent is very respectable. It says they are interested in more than just chilling on the beach.
But when they cease to be competent and aren't able to admit it, it's less respectable.
> It says they are interested in more than just chilling on the beach.
Which is not necessarily a good thing, being more interested in reshaping the world even after it becomes clear their vision for the new world isn't making it better just leaves someone with lots of power and bad ideas, not a good combo.
I'd much rather have them chilling on the beach after being done with the limits of their competence.
Indeed, the Americans have a very weird ruler for respect, which measures solely by power and sex (anything else beyond this two you have to wax wordy essays to convince of its value and still have dubious success) due to its original sin, crossing oceans and expanding westwards for its own sake, fueled by raw sex and power, be it brutes, scientists, farmers, mormons, evangelicals, and missionaries, then they teach their children the same, who teach their children the same.
Orphans and imports don't escape. Even those that are not born here (eg Musk), are eventually taught by society to do the same.
Zuckerberg and friends don't just want to chill on the beach: They want to 0wn it. A common property, then redefine it as "obviously not common", at the expense of others, so that no one else can chill on the beach, unless you provide compensation, for obviously infringing upon their rightful rights duh.
I still like original founders as CEO. Nothing beats the skin in the game from that.
Do you think meta is doing well with Zuck's skin? In the last 10 years their main success is through acquisitions, a most of their new initiatives fail miserably, and they've had nothing but PR scandals.
I recently read Careless People and I think it's hard to avoid the conclusion that he has been far out of his element for a long time.
Dude hasn’t had to grow since Harvard. Of course he’s stunted as a leader.
Weirdly, people often avoid relinquishing power
You don't get where Zuck is without a huge ego and power hunger. If is plan was to retire as a billionaire, he could have done so years ago.
> huge ego and power hunger
Some people should probably be stopped before they get too hungry. Same with some bald guy in Eurasia right now.
Bill Gates was reckless in the 90's when Microsoft was already leader and he was already a billionaire. He left his position as chairman at 60.
Not really such an "early" retirement.
But he's doing charity now, while still having more than 100 billions for himself, so somehow he's a saint.
Compared to his contemporaries? Pretty much xD
He retired at 94, which is exceptional on several accounts... If you date the "founding" of Berkshire Hathaway as when his fund bought the then textile manufacturer in 1965, he worked at the company he founded for 60 years! (If you consider the company that he founded to be the initial investment fund in his twenties, then he ran the company for over 70 years.) At 94, he's basically run Berkshire his entire life, which is hardly the get-rich-and-play sort. (In fact, he still lives in a small house in Omaha and is not known for spending lots of money.) Furthermore, he's pledged half his fortune to charity in his lifetime, and most of the rest after his death. He may have been responsible for the giving pledge, but if not, I think was instrumental in such success as it's had.
I think Buffet saw how financial market for 2025 was shaping up and just thought life is too short to waste.
The context was about being power hungry and ambitious to keep making more money, building a bigger business, perhaps fame, prestige, success, accomplishment... vs selling out early if just being a simple billionaire is adequate enough. Buffet worked his entire life as you said, which was my point, and was the richest in the world for a long time. He is not a counterpoint to Zuckerberg.
And all of the billionaires donate money, I don't think that sets him apart from the others all that much.
Buffet is set apart and exceptional because he understood exactly what it takes to trick everyone into thinking he is a good man. (btw that helps his stock too)
Now that he's gonna go soon (and having just a dozen more human gatherings and dinners left).. we can see that he fully doesn't give half an ounce of fuck after having received in full what he was after.
After much show, Buffet's "charity" money got simply inherited by his kids just as it was planned all along! (taxfree too, you plebs!)
The billionaires that care about the world are like Larry Page, tho still so evil.
"Exception"? but of course! Those two are the putin-level ones singlehandedly pwning the charts since 1997 after the reign of Getty Oil / Japanese / Walmart.
They are the literal sensei of Zuck the greenhorn and friends. So exceptional that the world thinks they're the exception.
This seems like cope and justification of bad behavior.
> But I guess ego keeps these people going.
I mean, if it were my company I’d also reserve the right to run it straight into the ground.
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, (…) If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
He’s a billionaire approaching 60. You don’t need to worry about him, his brand, or his reputation. If he cared about it that much, he could’ve stayed at Apple. He chose to move back closer to his family. He didn’t launch a new design firm because he needed it, but because he wanted to.
Legacy is not counted in dollars.
> He’s a billionaire approaching 60. You don’t need to worry about him, his brand, or his reputation.
"Interesting" take, was that projection?
>> he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success
These are two very different things. You can design a wonderful product but if there isn't a need for it in the market or your business people fail to sell it it can be a failure. Judging design based on sales makes no sense.
You've defined success as a financial hit.
He's a designer, the success will be whether or not he invents a good design, an innovation to how AI is consumed.
There are plenty of well designed products in his history that weren't big sellers.
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
What has LoveFrom produced in 6 years since Ive quit Apple?
Some expensive jackets:
https://www.moncler.com/en-us/sir-jony-ive-collaboration
Compostable red noses:
https://www.designweek.co.uk/issues/30-january-3-february-20...
King Charles' new seal:
https://www.wallpaper.com/design/terra-carta-seal-design-lov...
Ferrari’s first electric car (not yet released):
https://www.independent.co.uk/cars/electric-vehicles/ferrari...
Something vague with Airbnb:
Well, now we know about AirBnB: https://news.airbnb.com/airbnb-2025-summer-release/ :)
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Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)
I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
I don't think Ron Johnson is really analogous to Ive.
Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard.
Ive, on the other hand, I think is pretty universally recognized as a design genius who was directly responsible for the designs of some of the most important consumer products of the past few decades. Yes, it does seem like Jobs was a critical editor that tempered the worst of Ive's "form over function" tendencies like the butterfly keyboard and removing magsafe, but I think it's fair to say there wouldn't have been an iPhone as it was originally released without Ive.
I feel like Apple still would have had a pretty similar in-store experience even if someone else besides Johnson originally launched it.
Apple has always been a design company and if Ives wasn't there someone else would have filled the void.
From my memory
David Kelley and IDEO designed the original Macintosh Hermutt Esslinger and Frog Design did I think the SE's and Macintosh II and II CI. Robert Bruner and Lunar Design did the Quadra's Robert Bruner also Hired Ives.
Johnson thought he was smarter than everyone else. His success at Apple reshaping the retail experience was a kind of a one-hit-wonder that he then thought would simply be a blueprint for any retail company.
He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else.
The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business:
After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13]
When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14]
Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16]
Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]
He had no idea about branding. You can’t just sell generic products that you can get at Amazon for maximum profit in retail. You actually need to have a differentiated brand.
For comparison, during that same time period, the retail successes were the designer collaborations, like Versace x H&M or Target x Rodarte, etc…
All Johnson had to do was bring in some designer collaborations…
that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.
And even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders that people will willingly drop everything to go work for and who leads them on to achieve great things.
I think Elon’s strategy is that he hires workaholics like himself. It’s not a scalable general purpose strategy.
I don't think this fits anyone's definition of work:
https://www.reddit.com/r/PathOfExile2/comments/1hwxc17/docum...
He's paying a talented guy to do something and then claims it as his own, that's definitely work! (Well, at least that's pretty close to his actual work as a company owner).
His real full time job is watching alt-right videos and memes on YouTube and 4chan.
It seems as though you are trying to say that he isn’t a workaholic because he’s not very dedicated to playing games, but that surely doesn’t make sense.
He said he was very dedicated, but turned out he wasn’t (surprise). What else could he be lying about? Surely not his work ethic
I kind of don't imagine a workaholic having online gaming scandal about paying someone to run a game for them and then doubling down on that, but well, I was already told before I lack imagination.
That is kinda orthogonal to being a workaholic.
It isn't hard to imagine someone spending 16 hours of working and then going home and playing a game and putting in money to make themselves more powerful in the game.
so does steve jobs, seems to have worked out for him
Be careful not to confuse “great leader” with “cult leader”.
A great leader is someone who cares about you and helps you surface the best version of yourself. They understand there is a person behind the work and don’t neglect the human side. They mention the team behind projects when talking about successes and don’t blame others for failures.
A cult leader is someone with a hypnotic personality who puts themselves first before anyone else. They couldn’t give less of a shit about you or your sacrifices, and will fire you even if you sleep in the office to get more work done. They are selfish and narcissistic, believe they know everything, and speak about successes as if they personally did all the work.
What would you call a leader that puts the objective ahead of everything else, including employees and themselves? I think that more closely aligns with people that have been very successful.
> What would you call a leader that puts the objective ahead of everything else, including employees and themselves?
That definition is too broad to be useful. Is the “objective” to make money at all costs, and the leader is willing to suck employees and themselves dry, even over protests? Or is the objective to build a free hospital in a poor country and everyone is so committed to the cause they are willing to make personal sacrifices?
> I think that more closely aligns with people that have been very successful.
Also aligns with scammers and other grifters who are now in jail. “Successful” is also too broad a term to be useful. One person may think that “being very successful” means being rich, while to another interpersonal relationships and a happy life are what matter.
"cult leaders" are, by definition, "great leaders" - they excel at leading people. Sure, it's better to work for someone that cares about you instead of someone that only cares about themselves. But that doesn't make this a Venn Diagram - there are great leaders who are selfish and narcissistic. There are cult leaders who aren't either.
> "cult leaders" are, by definition, "great leaders"
Not as defined, and I did define them.
What matters is the explained distinction between the two types of leader, arguing exact semantics of individual words in the shorthand term isn’t productive.
Since the original poster I replied to used the word “amazing” (plus the context of the conversation), I used “great” to mean “Very good; excellent; wonderful; fantastic”, not “effective”.
> even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders
None of the leaders in this conversation are good people. Elon's controversies are way past the point of "some people decry" (why even use a phrasing this convoluted unless you just want to signal that you don't agree with it?) and firmly in "lots of great people wouldn't touch it with a pole". Part of leadership is creating a safe work environment and shielding your companies/brands from unnecessary drama, and Elon has done an absolutely abysmal job at it lately.
I don't think that's true. Apple Watch? Market leading product. Took something very nerdy and made it fashionable enough that people from all walks of life wear it. Got the form factor so right that even a decade later it has changed very little. Of course there were missteps in the quest for thinness with the laptops but I still preferred my Touch Bar MacBook Pro to any non-Apple laptop I've ever used. If that's the worst he did, that's still better than almost anyone else.
He's still a great designer, the problem though is that without the right kind of editorializing force he'll make mistakes, usually in the form of compromising practicality and functionality for the sake of aesthetics. I should probably clarify that this isn't some fault unique to Jony Ive. It feels like it's common among designers and probably just creative people in general.
Except that freezes Jony in time, as if he didn’t work alongside that editor for decades. I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.
I’m optimistic for this partnership and I hope you’re right.
But Ive post-jobs just doesn’t have the same track record. He’s had a few years, maybe he’s learned and matured. I hope so.
> I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.
He's had 6 years to create something—anything!—so far
Given how messy the model names are and some of the failures like 'GPTs' I get the sense that he's pretty hands-off and mostly focuses on picking the people and then letting them do what they want. Maybe that'll work with Ive, maybe not.
Altman clearly has vision and a sense for where the puck is going with AI, but being a design editor is something else entirely
He's very good at doing startup/scaleup management, in a ruthless/snakey skill level. I think that's something everyone can agree.
But vision? I'm not so sure, he had great company and help along the way, and now that he has been left alone (arguably due to his own actions) he's selling the image of competence in areas that he hasn't demonstrated skills whatsoever. We'll see.
Clearly? I don’t think that’s certain at all.
For me, OpenAI's venture into AI adjacent things (Windsurf, JI's company), is a signal that they are no longer seriously pursuing AGI.
They never seriously persued AGI. It's all a hype, a scam. When will people finally understand this?
My take is they persued what was possible and hoped that would lead to AGI. They and probably everyone in the space then used hype to get continued investment and maybe to some extent believed it themselves. It isn't all a scam however, ChatGPT is useful.
It was always marketing and never serious
No? It's not a acqui-hire? The article says "joining forces with the legendary designer to make a push into hardware."
Nobody says what kind of hardware. A wearable is the likely bet. Maybe a home robot, but that's a few years out.
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 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.”
https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
The link however isn't informative since "independent" can mean its opposite. Along with every other word in the article.
We are after all literally talking about the guy who called openai "open"ai? Even your kid knows that none of the words used need make any sense.
Ive doesn’t seem to have come from an especially privileged background (beyond the obvious good fortune of being a white guy in good health born in a developed English-speaking country in the post-war era etc.) Middle-class certainly, but not markedly upper-middle-class or a posh boy. Though I suppose I’m in danger of sounding like pg talking about the Collisons as if they were poor boys made good.
Relative to the sweatshop workers he relied on to avoid sewing his own shirts.
For the same reason we don’t need 9,000 operating systems, it’s trivial to copy-paste, we don’t need Ive, Altman. The main audience is Millennials and younger and they know how this all works. There’s no generating hype when it’s more of the same; our brains normalize and simply cannot find novelty in it.
SaaS competition was faked through cheap financing since every solution can be tuned for performance and features copy pasted. It’s software after all. We weren’t trying to be the first to save a bunch of stranded people. Just unicorn before the hype bubble for your business popped.
This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives.
“I hate programmers. They make everything so complicated.” Silicon Valley TV show is how people see software engineers. Asocial children.
They don’t doubt there’s value in medicine research and real stuff logistics using software but have a sense it’s just serving software company employees more so than humanity at this point.
And politics reflects public sentiment. Software workers do not have the same tax write off benefits as other classes of workers anymore. Along with end of ZIRP, these moves are due to a lot of discussed away from the public, global pushback to tech bros running the world.
> This forum doesn’t want to believe this because their identity is wrapped up in it. But I talk to people outside software, and very few feel they get real value out of all this technology. That ultimately it’s just been a big distraction from their lives.
Re: LLMs--this has been my experience as well. People aren't thrilled with adopting something that has been sold to them as a replacement for intellectual labor either, and don't see the immediate benefit (outside of the programmer types that seem to often have an almost masochistic relationship with software that's only viable use case is 'replacing' their skillset).
This is a refreshing and real comment. Ask all your uber drivers two questions:
- do you use chatGPT and could you more or less explain what LLMs are?
- do you think AI is useful and would you buy a product because it has AI?
Enjoy the answers.
Why uber drivers only? They are certainly pretty high up the comfort ranks—there's an enormous distance from the uber driver just to the food delivery guy with an ebike.
(the latter isn't doing all too bad either compared to many others still alive)
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Relative to cave men those sweatshop workers are so privileged they are basically gods. But that's a rather silly statement imo.
Relative to your actual value to humanity you are over privileged.
Bizarre incrementalism measure of progress, they’re people so they’re automatically peers.
Wank your economic political philosophy all you want. One of billions is one of billions; metrics don’t lie. I say we devalue a bunch of first world office workers whose knowledge work skills are replicated by machines. It’s just a few million relative to billions. A minority with too much privilege and reach into other’s lives for economic skills replicates by others and machines. Let’s have some grown up conversations these days shall we, twee America?
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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?
Same conclusion I got. This is weird as fuck. They seem kinda desperate.
Money is real. Privately held company valuations are not. This is an all-stock deal, so what it's "worth" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running, or how much they can offload to Mayasoshi Son and Arab Gulf sovereign funds.
Tesla at a PE in the neighborhood of 200 also isn’t real - public valuations are insane as well. The US economic system is completely unhinged from reality.
> Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running
Exactly - money is hype. Hype is money. Which goes into the foundation of money to begin with: confidence and faith. And the levers of power which move that confidence and faith are decreasing in number and increasing in length/leverage.
Need != want
Sure, but is that relevant? I'm not sure people below the poverty line are acquiring SV companies.
In this case as I understand it, no money is being paid - it's a stock deal. For stock that isn't yet publicly trading, thus 'priced' pretty speculatively. So it is pretty abstract, and unreal.
People below the poverty line are real. But are they really “very, very” real?
They are in fact, very, very, VERY real.
Write a blog? What is this? 2015? Just ask Chatgpt to do it for you.
Money is a social construct
