Jony Ive has 15 to 20 ideas for OpenAI’s family of AI devices, and they will likely be nothing like an iPhone, he told CEO Sam Altman at the startup’s DevDay conference on Monday.
Ive criticized smartphones and tablets — some of the very devices he made famous — during the talk and said he hopes these new AI devices will make humans happier and less anxious.
“When I said we have an uncomfortable relationship with our technology, I mean that’s the most obscene understatement,” said 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 told Altman, who acted as interviewer at the event in San Francisco.
OpenAI bought Ive’s device startup earlier this year for more than $6 billion. That sparked speculation about what AI gadgets the former Apple designer is working on. Altman previously discussed the idea of an AI companion as well as an entire family of devices.
The combination of OpenAI and Ive’s design chops poses a potential threat to Apple, which has dominated the mobile era but lags behind in generative AI.
Ive said progress is so swift right now that it’s hard for him and his design team to focus.
“That momentum has led us to create 15 to 20 really compelling product ideas. The challenge is to focus,” Ive told 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 said he hopes the devices will be fun and address some of the issues smartphones and tablets have created over the past decade or two.
“The ramifications and consequences of not caring and not being careful are truly horrendous,” Ive said. “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.”
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That may have been another dig at Apple, which is super serious about its devices and tries to make them as high-end and exclusive as possible.
He dropped at least two other clues.
“We’ve gone very deep on trying to understand our person-to-person interface. How incredibly sophisticated and nuanced that is,” Ive explained. “The way we think is so, so entwined with other devices and tools.”
Despite seeming to criticize Apple, he also leaned on a famous idea from Steve Jobs, saying these new AI devices should simply work.
“It should seem inevitable, it should seem obvious — as if there wasn’t possibly another rational solution to the problem,” he said. “You’ll look at something and think, ‘Well, yeah, of course you’d do it that way, why did it take so long?”
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