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.
