|||
Today, OpenAI announced1 they are partnering with (ok, buying for $6+billion) the AI wing of Jony Ive’s company and creating a new AI company called io. From the io website:
As io merges with OpenAI, Jony and LoveFrom will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.
There’s a lot of chatter in the technosphere today about how this is a sea-change in the industry and smartphone makers should be worried. Maybe — but I don’t think so.
Ive has proven to be a great designer when he has guardrails in place. At Apple, Steve Jobs was that guardrail.
After Jobs left, Apple had a string of questionable product design choices from the “trash can” Mac Pro, the butterfly keyboard, the one-port Macbooks, and a software direction that veered away from usability.
The problem with any of these AI things is not the design or the intelligence, it’s the data. People have their contacts, calendars, files, email, messages, location data, and everyting else in their phones (or more accurately, their phone platform’s cloud storage). Without access to the data, any personal AI dingus is just a portable Alexa.
If you’re Sam Altman, how do you solve this? Easy. Make a massive merger with a phone platform.
My guess: io was created as an aquisition entity. Within 5 years, Apple will buy io and Sam Altman will be a high-level executive at Apple. This is why io was a spin-off from OpenAI. Integrating OpenAI with Apple (which has already started…) is the obvious conclusion to this whole thing.
Update 2025-05-23: After seeing and hearing more and more on this, I feel even better about my take on it.
io is an acquistion play.
Having a small company like io as a standalone entity that has full access to OpenAI technology without all the baggage of their non-profit, their Board, and their massive investment from Microsoft makes io an easier purchase.
Acquisition hopes also explain the massively-overpriced merger with Ive. Jony Ive is good, but he’s not six-billion-good. With that price signaling in place, the floor for acquisition negotiations is much higher.
