Is AI soluble in a dedicated device? Humane's attempts with the Ai Pin and Rabbit's R1 have been largely unsuccessful. "Those products were very bad," confirmed Jony Ive at Bloomberg. "We haven't seen new ways of thinking emerge through these devices," added the former Apple chief designer, who just sold his startup io to OpenAI for a whopping $6.5 billion.
100 million units planned
Jony Ive, his design studio LoveFrom, and the startup io actually began working with the OpenAI teams 18 months ago. Originally, as revealed by the Wall Street Journal, io was supposed to build a device based on ChatGPT technology. However, Sam Altman, the head of OpenAI, concluded last fall that the hardware needed to integrate his technology to offer a standout experience. Not to repeat the Ai Pin flop, so to speak.
The two men have already dropped a few hints about this mysterious upcoming device. It won't be a smartphone or smart glasses. Instead, it will be a discreet object that fits in a pocket and can also be used on a desk. A very important aspect is that the product would be designed to be aware of the user's environment and life. It aims to become the "third" essential device that a user would want to put on their desk, after the MacBook and the iPhone.
Jony Ive spoke of a "new design movement," while Sam Altman evokes a family of products that blend hardware and software as coherently as Apple's. The two partners want to move away from the classic model of interaction with AI—opening a computer, going to a website, typing a query—to offer a new physical interface dedicated to AI.
In an internal memo, Sam Altman makes no secret of his burning ambition: first, this famous device should be commercialized by the end of next year. Second, OpenAI plans to ship a whopping 100 million units! "We're not going to ship 100 million devices on day one," the executive qualified. But he does promise that OpenAI will be able to produce them "faster than any company has ever shipped 100 million units of a new product." It's going to be a big deal now.
Source: WSJ
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