Since founding OpenAI in 2015, Sam Altman has spent many days thinking that the company’s generative artificial intelligence (AI) products needed a new type of device to succeed. Since leaving Apple in 2019, Jony Ive, designer of the iPhone, iPod and MacBook Air, has been thinking about what the next great computing device could be.
Today, the two men and their companies are teaming up to develop a device that would succeed the smartphone and deliver the benefits of AI in a new format, without being limited by the rectangular screen that has been the dominant computing tool of the last decade, according to two people familiar with the discussions.
The project was described as preliminary, but Altman and Ive developed some concepts and sought to secure up to $1 billion in funding from SoftBank, the Japanese technology investor led by Masayoshi Son. With SoftBank’s backing, the two men could leverage the semiconductor expertise of Arm, the British chip design company purchased by Mr. Son in 2016 and recently listed on the stock market.
The commercial structure behind the project is not yet clear. Altman’s company, OpenAI, is an AI research lab in San Francisco with about 400 researchers, engineers and support staff, while LoveFrom, Ive’s design firm in San Francisco , has about three dozen industrial and software designers, as well as a few engineers.
The discussions have been ongoing since the start of the year and have been reported by The Information, a technology publication, and the Financial Times.
This partnership illustrates how generative AI is disrupting the status quo in Silicon Valley. Since the introduction of OpenAI’s online chatbot, ChatGPT, late last year, businesses have rushed to reinvent their businesses and harness its power to answer questions, write emails, presentations and poems, and even generate computer code.
Rather than typing on smartphones and taking photos, they imagine a future device in the form of something as simple as a pendant or glasses that can understand the world in real time, using ‘a sophisticated virtual assistant capable of answering questions and processing images.
Mr. Altman had already invested in a company pursuing this vision, Humane, founded by Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno, two former Apple employees. They plan to bring their device, which they call a “disappearing computer,” to market later this year.
One reason Altman is determined to develop his own device is that he wants to avoid having OpenAI’s distribution dependent on Apple or Google’s Android. Reliance on other platforms has caused problems for tech giants, such as Facebook and Amazon, because Apple and Google take a cut of sales on their platform. Apple has also introduced privacy limits, which reduces advertising sales.
But the path to creating new hardware devices is strewn with failures. Amazon and Facebook both tried to develop their own smartphones and abandoned their efforts after failing.
Few people in Silicon Valley have more experience developing devices than Mr. Ive. He was the driving force behind the development of the Apple Watch, the only major new device the company has introduced since Steve Jobs’ death in 2011. In 2019, Ive left the company to start LoveFrom, but he signed a multi-year contract to continue working with Apple.
Last year, Ive and Apple decided to end their collaboration. In negotiating the end of their working relationship, Apple and Ive agreed that there would be no limits to the products he could develop in the future, according to two people familiar with the matter.
An Apple spokesperson declined to comment.