iPhone design guru and OpenAI chief promise an AI device revolution
Everything over the last 30 years, according to Sir Jony Ive, has led to this moment: a partnership between the iPhone designer and the developer of ChatGPT.Ive has sold his hardware startup, io, to OpenAI and will take on creative and design leadership across the merged businesses.“I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, to this moment,” he says in a video announcing the $6.4bn (£4.8bn) deal.
The main aim will be to move on from Ive’s signature achievement designing Apple’s most successful product, as well as the iPod, iPad and Apple Watch.The British-born designer has already developed a prototype io device, and one of its users is OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman.Speaking to Ive in a glossy, nine-minute promo heavy with patented Silicon Valley optimism, Altman says of the mystery gadget: “I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”Regardless of the hyperbole, expectations would be vaulting anyway.Ive and Altman are worth backing, given the products they have overseen, but observers say they have set themselves an ambitious goal – one made all the more difficult by the legacy of Ive’s time at Apple.
“It really will have to be amazing to prise people away from today’s screen-based devices,” says Martha Bennett, an analyst at Forrester Research.Bennett points to the failure of AI hardware devices such as Humane’s defunct AI “pin” – a small, wearable AI assistant that received poor reviews – as an example of how the duo have a “steep hill to climb”.Ive described the Humane pin and the equally small-scale Rabbit R1 device as “very poor products”.So what was the prototype that Altman was testing? He has told employees that OpenAI plans to build 100m AI “companions” that will be part of users’ everyday life, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday.The product will be “unobtrusive” and capable of being fully aware of a user’s surroundings and life, the paper report added, and it will be a third core device that someone will have on their desk after a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.
The device is neither a phone nor a pair of glasses; Altman said Ive had been sceptical about building something to be worn on the body, according to the WSJ.The video indicated that the fruits of the io deal – a complex arrangement whereby Ive’s LoveFrom design company assumes design and creative oversight of OpenAI and io – will emerge next year.Sign up to Business TodayGet set for the working day – we'll point you to all the business news and analysis you need every morningafter newsletter promotionBenedict Evans, a tech analyst, says Ive has clearly been brought onboard to answer a key question for OpenAI and Altman: “How do they somehow bootstrap themselves into becoming a major platform company?”Evans adds: “This is an AI research lab that is running around trying to find solutions that will turn it into the next Apple or Google.”AI models are essentially becoming commoditised – “It’s not clear how you differentiate them from each other,” says Evans – and now Altman is trying to find hardware to combine with OpenAI’s groundbreaking software.“OpenAI is trying to do a lot of things at once, and this io deal is part of that.
Sam is trying to build the plane while flying it,” he adds.The Ive-Altman video is shot in Roman Coppola’s Cafe Zoetrope in San Francisco, a pointed reference to a past visionary.Ive and Altman believe that AI will bring them the hardware of the future.
OpenAI buys iPhone architect’s startup for $6.4bn
OpenAI is buying an untested startup for $6.4bn, the ChatGPT maker’s biggest acquisition yet. The hardware startup, called io, was founded by Apple design guru Jony Ive, known best as one of the principal architects of the iPhone. Ive and OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, said in a blog post that their partnership has been two years in the making.“A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition,” they wrote in the blog post, which offered scant details on upcoming devices
Scattered Spider is focus of NCA inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers
A hacker community known as Scattered Spider is a key suspect in a criminal inquiry into cyber-attacks against UK retailers including Marks & Spencer, detectives have said.Scattered Spider, a loose collective of native English-speaking cybercriminals, has been strongly linked with hacks against M&S, the Co-op and Harrods. M&S said on Wednesday it will take an estimated £300m hit to profits after its systems were hacked last month.The UK’s National Crime Agency, whose remit includes combating cybercrime, said the group was a focus in its investigations.“We are looking at the group that is publicly known as Scattered Spider, but we’ve got a range of different hypotheses and we’ll follow the evidence to get to the offenders,” Paul Foster, the head of the NCA’s national cybercrime unit, told the BBC
Most AI chatbots easily tricked into giving dangerous responses, study finds
Hacked AI-powered chatbots threaten to make dangerous knowledge readily available by churning out illicit information the programs absorb during training, researchers say.The warning comes amid a disturbing trend for chatbots that have been “jailbroken” to circumvent their built-in safety controls. The restrictions are supposed to prevent the programs from providing harmful, biased or inappropriate responses to users’ questions.The engines that power chatbots such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude – large language models (LLMs) – are fed vast amounts of material from the internet.Despite efforts to strip harmful text from the training data, LLMs can still absorb information about illegal activities such as hacking, money laundering, insider trading and bomb-making
‘Every person that clashed with him has left’: the rise, fall and spectacular comeback of Sam Altman
From Elon Musk to his own board, anyone who has come up against the OpenAI CEO has lost. In a gripping new account of the battle for AI supremacy, writer Karen Hao says we should all be wary of the power he now wieldsThe short-lived firing of Sam Altman, the CEO of possibly the world’s most important AI company, was sensational. When he was sacked by OpenAI’s board members, some of them believed the stakes could not have been higher – the future of humanity – if the organisation continued under Altman. Imagine Succession, with added apocalypse vibes. In early November 2023, after three weeks of secret calls and varying degrees of paranoia, the OpenAI board agreed: Altman had to go
Elon Musk claims he will step back from political donations in near future
Elon Musk claimed on Tuesday that he would decrease the amount of money he spends on politics for the foreseeable future. If true, the reduction would represent a significant turnaround after the world’s richest person positioned himself as the Republican party’s most enthusiastic donor over the last year.“I think, in terms of political spending, I’m going to do a lot less in the future,” Musk said during a video interview with Bloomberg News at the Qatar Economic Forum.Bloomberg’s Mishal Husain asked the Tesla CEO if he had decided how much to spend on midterm elections, which elicited Musk’s response. When asked why he was pulling back, Musk said flatly: “I think I’ve done enough” – drawing laughs from the audience, although it was unclear if he was joking
Almost half of young people would prefer a world without internet, UK study finds
Almost half of young people would rather live in a world where the internet does not exist, according to a new survey.The research reveals that nearly 70% of 16- to 21-year-olds feel worse about themselves after spending time on social media. Half (50%) would support a “digital curfew” that would restrict their access to certain apps and sites past 10pm, while 46% said they would rather be young in a world without the internet altogether.A quarter of respondents spent four or more hours a day on social media, while 42% of those surveyed admitted to lying to their parents and guardians about what they do online.While online, 42% said they had lied about their age, 40% admitted to having a decoy or “burner” account, and 27% said they pretended to be a different person completely
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