Over three decades working in Silicon Valley, Jony Ive has shaped the shell of the iMac, designed the look of the iPod and come up with the form factor for the iPhone. Pretty much every major piece of Apple technology we touch, from the heyday of Alta Vista to today, went through Ive’s hands first.
No doubt such a legacy enticed Sam Altman to recruit Ive, with the OpenAI founder this week buying the former Apple designer’s startup io for $6.5 billion (that’s at least 130 million vintage iPod shuffles) — then announcing, in a cringey Davis Guggenheim video, the two would be working together to create an undisclosed “family of devices” to run the apps based on OpenAI’s models. io, io, it’s off to Ive we go.
Altman has been trying to convince investors and the public that he will change the course of civilization pretty much since he released ChatGPT thirty months ago (and really for a while before that). What do you do if you’re Jobs-ishly hoping to introduce technology that everyone will use? You hire the man whose technology everyone uses.
Well, that’s one thing you do. The other thing you can do is create programs that people can’t resist. On that score, Altman has a much shakier track record. ChatGPT garnered 100 million sign-ups in its first two months but the momentum has slowed; these days about 5% of people on the planet are active users. New “reasoning” iterations like 4o have yet to catch on, while the programmer-oriented o1 has shown no lack of problems. Meanwhile the quest for AGI slogs on, with little scientific evidence we are close to a machine intelligence matching a human’s full reasoning ability anytime soon.
The main factor in these systems not yet fully weaving themselves into our hourly fabric seem to have little to do with the form they take. It’s true that device porn is an inevitable part of any new consumer adoption. But far more important, most industrial psychologists believe, is what they enable us to do. And for all the nibbling-around-life’s-edges of the apps based on OpenAI’s models (which, critically, the company mostly relies on others to develop), very little here has truly revolutionized our existence so far. There’s only so many thank-you notes and wacky images you can ask an AI program to create.
The evidence that it’s the app not the machine is that past attempts at AI-specific devices, from the R1 Rabbit to the Humane AI Pin, have thus far flopped or gotten really bad reviews. But I think even more problematic here is that Altman is making a philosophical pivot undigestible even by his own rhetoric. AI is different than previous technological revolutions, Altman has said (correctly), because it doesn’t simply change what we can do but what and how we think (or, more precisely, don’t need to think).
The personal-computer brought digital technology to everyday people and the Internet connected us to communities and information we otherwise wouldn’t have access to. But if AI delivers on its promise — and it remains a big if — it will make an even more fundamental change than that, introducing a whole new intelligence to live aside us humans; it’s far more akin to an alien landing on this planet than a product launch or even scientific breakthrough.
As Altman himself wrote earlier this year (about AGI), this “is the beginning of something for which it’s hard not to say ‘this time it’s different’; the economic growth in front of us looks astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we cure all diseases, have much more time to enjoy with our families and can fully realize our creative potential.” Something so pervasively existential doesn’t rise or fall based on how cool your device is, and spending $6.5 billion to ensure that it comes in great packaging only makes us wonder if you lack the goods for that pervasive existentialism.
You could almost feel Altman and Ive themselves grappling with this contradiction, writing in their blog post announcing the partnership, “This is an extraordinary moment. Computers are now seeing, thinking and understanding. Despite this unprecedented capability, our experience remains shaped by traditional products and interfaces.”
Also and on an unrelated note, it’s a little weird that Microsoft didn’t come up in all this. I mean, OpenAI is primarily backed by a company that makes tablets and other devices. You’d think Altman might have given Satya Nadella a call about anyone in-house he could borrow before going out and writing a check for $6.5 billion to the Apple guy.
AI Agents are where Altman envisions this all going, and he may be on to something — a kind of merging of Siri and a CAA assistant to accompany us on all of life’s little journeys. The one thing he said in the Guggenheim video that landed is that an indispensably helpful application like an AI Agent requires something less clunky than a laptop, though he conveniently seemed to forget about a phone. Google hasn’t, and its ChatGPT competitor Gemini, which is designed for both Androids and iPhones, seems to be making plenty of strides by integrating with the tech we already have instead of selling us one we didn’t know we wanted. (In fact I almost wonder if envy that Google can bundle itself so easily with its own phones isn’t a primary driver for Altman here.)
Now we should be wary, in all our caution about the hype, not to fall into a kind of future-myopia on the other hand either; not many people foresaw a device in our pockets that can help us shop, date, job-hunt and gamble before Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in January 2007 either. But you could understand the appeal of making those activities, the building blocks of modern existence, a lot more portable. We’ve yet to figure out if a companion machine intelligence is nearly as useful or safe in the first place, let alone what packaging we want to stuff it into if it is.
That isn’t all to say new interfaces won’t be a part of our digital future. The idea that a phone — a bulky rectangle we read and touch — is how we conduct our digital lives is an accident of technology or at the very least the result of just one of its many historical moments. As the world gets more multimodal — Silicon Valley-speak for how you can talk, look or gesture instead of type — the idea of fingers and screens will become more antiquated.
Altman stands in good company with this belief. Meta’s newly relaunched Ray-Ban smartglasses are an attempt to merge the cloud-based power of AI chatbots with the concrete appeal of a fashion accessory, while Apple Vision Pro similarly aims to give us immersiveness by wrapping itself around our faces instead of dropping into our hands. The quirkiest but weirdly most promising of this crop may be Samsung’s “Ballie.” The long-awaited robotic sphere that is finally set to hit the market this summer is a kind of home assistant that’s pitched somewhere between a pet and a butler — a personalized BB-8 to help you feed the dog, conduct your yoga session and translate your video call.
But while all these help-offering non-phone products rely on AI in some form or another, they’re not driven by a need to recalibrate how humanity thinks. Because those two propositions, while potentially linked, exist separately. We may or may not soon interact with technology more intimately and differently than we do now (requiring a new Ive-like design) AND AI may or may not soon assist us in ways we’ve never been assisted before. Even if both turn out to be true, the idea that the same company would lead both charges hardly fits with the history of the past three tech decades. IBM made computers and Microsoft gave us desktop programs for them; Apple devices are everywhere and we get on them to use Google.
Of course, it’s possible that one company can do both, like it’s also possible I can become an award-winning chef. Nothing technically is stopping OpenAI. It’s just that a company whose entire resources and raison d’etre are oriented to how machines will think for us doesn’t seem best suited to crack a post-phone future that no one else has solved to date. OpenAI makes models, new ways computers can think, and needs developers to build apps on them. That’s what the firm’s success hinges on, not whether it can design a machine as addictive as the iPhone.
You could be forgiven, given how many announcements OpenAI makes, for wondering about Altman’s motivations; like a vintage Terrell Owens, who often seemed to play football to support his press-conference habit, Altman can sometimes seem to run a tech company to feed his blog-post addiction. The reality lags behind the promise.
The Ive announcement fits the trend. An AI device as sleek and irresistible in 2030 as the iPhone was in 2010 sounds like a great idea, as great as astonishing economic growth and all that free time. But the machine models aren’t able to give us any of that, and there’s scarce evidence Sam Altman or anyone else has yet figured out how to build them so they can.
#Sam #Altmans #partnership #Jony #Ive #Odd #Component
