If I had asked AI to write me the most implausible scenario it could think of, it might have struggled to come up with an expensive deal between one of the tech industry’s most famous designers and an upstart company that tried to turn the AI industry on its head.
But here we are. The AI world has been abuzz in recent days with the news that former Apple designer Jony Ive is teaming up with OpenAI to create a device that will take artificial intelligence firmly into the real world.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Ive announced the deal in a video message that said a lot without giving away much detail. There was talk of reimagining what it means to use a computer.
What exactly will the partnership entail? What product are they planning?
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The closest the teaser video got to spilling the goods was telling us that the company had been formed to figure out how to create a family of devices that would let people use AI to “create all sorts of wonderful things”. Instead of, say, the slightly nauseating cartoonish images of pumped-up politicians and public figures styled as superheroes leading the masses that have proliferated on social media.
All we know is that it is unlikely to be wearable, given Ive’s previous views on that front. And, according to Ive, the prototype is “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen”. Big words.
There is a lot riding on this, and not just the $6.5 billion that OpenAI paid for Ives’s company IO. The credibility of a whole sector could rise or fall depending on what the partnership produces.
There have been false starts here before. Remember the Humane AI Pin? The device was launched with a splash in April 2024, aiming to replace the smartphone as our essential device. The start-up, founded by former Apple employees Bethany Bongiorno and Imran Chaudhri, got more than $230 million in backing from investors to develop the device.
But soon after the Pin hit the market, the problems began. Early reviews were not good. Consumer experience didn’t seem to be much better and, before long, the returns were outpacing the purchases. There was also the small matter of the battery case being a fire hazard.
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The Rabbit R1 was another device that had a rocky start, though subsequent software updates for the voice- and touch-controlled AI device have made it more interesting.
This OpenAI-IO partnership cannot afford to hit bumps in the road. But why should OpenAI and Ive be any different from the rest?
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Ive comes with a big reputation. The former chief design officer for Apple, he is credited with the design of the iMac, the iPhone, the MacBook Air, the iPad and the Apple Watch to name a few. He was a close friend and collaborator of the late Steve Jobs, who was described as his “spiritual partner” or the closest thing to a soul mate at Apple.
He officially left the tech giant in 2019 to start his own design company LoveFrom, but his legacy endures, whether you like or loathe his work.
The smartphone as we currently know it is a monster he helped to create, something he hinted at in an onstage interview at Stripe Sessions earlier this month.
“Certain products that I’ve been very, very involved in have had some unintended consequences that have been anything but pleasant,” he said. The smartphone has had an outsize influence on society for about two decades. That was a decent run for any device and it’s not quite over yet.
Getting our heads out of phones isn’t a bad plan though. We could all do with less screen time – which can quickly lead us to doomscrolling and nefarious rabbit holes – and more time spent on what is going on around us. It just feels like all the answers to this – smartwatches, glasses, AI devices – aren’t really the answer, because they will still be competing for our attention.
Could we evolve the smartphone into something less intrusive? Probably. Meta thinks the future is in wearables, going all in on its partnership with Ray-Ban. A decade after it abandoned Google Glass, the tech giant is also bringing back AR glasses.
Mind you, smartwatches were expected to cure us of our screen addiction, but they seem to make it worse. Not only are we still slaves to our phones, but we now have another screen demanding our attention, just in case there was a nanosecond when we didn’t have our phone within glancing distance.
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Instead of just looking like a screen addict, you now get to look like a rude screen addict who is checking their watch every five minutes. Is it an important message? Are they checking the time because you are boring the pants off them? Who knows?
Maybe the time has not yet come to start writing the obituary of the smartphone. The death of the laptop and PC has been predicted time and time again, and yet they persist. Even print newspapers, which were thought to be heading the way of the dodo more than a decade ago are, with the exception of some high-profile casualties over the years, still clinging on.
If I’ve learned one thing over the years, it’s this: be very careful about predicting the death of something. Whether it is laptops, crypto or the inexplicable return of terrible fashion items, they are likely to hang around just to spite you.
