Jony Ive Says He’s Juggling as much as 20 Concepts for OpenAI Devices

Jony Ive has 15 to twenty concepts for OpenAI’s household of AI units, and they’re going to possible be nothing like an iPhone, he informed CEO Sam Altman on the startup’s DevDay convention on Monday.

Ive criticized smartphones and tablets — among the very units he made well-known — through the discuss and stated he hopes these new AI units will make people happier and fewer anxious.

“When I said we have an uncomfortable relationship with our technology, I mean that’s the most obscene understatement,” stated Ive, Apple’s former chief designer.

“We have a chance to not just redress that, but absolutely change the situation that we find ourselves in. That we don’t accept this has to be the norm,” he informed Altman, who acted as interviewer on the occasion in San Francisco.

OpenAI purchased Ive’s gadget startup earlier this 12 months for greater than $6 billion. That sparked hypothesis about what AI devices the previous Apple designer is engaged on. Altman beforehand mentioned the concept of an AI companion in addition to a whole household of units.

The mixture of OpenAI and Ive’s design chops poses a possible menace to Apple, which has dominated the cellular period however lags behind in generative AI.

Ive stated progress is so swift proper now that it is exhausting for him and his design crew to focus.

“That momentum has led us to create 15 to 20 really compelling product ideas. The challenge is to focus,” Ive informed Altman onstage. “It would be easy if you knew there are three good ones. It’s just not like that. We’re designing a family of products. And we’re trying to make sure we’re judicious and thoughtful in what we focus on and to then not be distracted.”

Ive stated he hopes the units will likely be enjoyable and handle among the points smartphones and tablets have created over the previous decade or two. 

“The ramifications and consequences of not caring and not being careful are truly horrendous,” Ive stated. “In terms of the interfaces we design, if we can’t smile honestly, if it’s just another deeply serious exclusive thing, I think that would do us all a huge disservice.”

That might have been one other dig at Apple, which is tremendous critical about its units and tries to make them as high-end and unique as potential. 

He dropped at the least two different clues. 

“We’ve gone very deep on trying to understand our person-to-person interface. How incredibly sophisticated and nuanced that is,” Ive defined. “The way we think is so, so entwined with other devices and tools.”

Despite seeming to criticize Apple, he additionally leaned on a well-known concept from Steve Jobs, saying these new AI units ought to merely work. 

“It should seem inevitable, it should seem obvious — as if there wasn’t possibly another rational solution to the problem,” he stated. “You’ll look at something and think, ‘Well, yeah, of course you’d do it that way, why did it take so long?”

Sign up for BI’s Tech Memo publication right here. Reach out to me by way of e-mail at [email protected].