A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor.
It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function.
More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.
Jobs has been dead for almost 15 years, he's already had plenty of time to prove himself. By the time he left Apple he was known for his obsession with thinness at the cost of function (if not straight up ruining the product), such as that stupid keyboard design from the late 2010s that sucked to type on, had failure rates comparable to the Xbox 360's RRoD, and was somewhere in the ballpark of $700 to repair because the ridiculous thin construction didn't allow for individual keys to be replaced.
Why does Ive need to be churning out continuous hits? There is no shame in quitting while ahead, or considering your previous success to be a tough act to follow.
I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head.
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, (…) If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
He’s a billionaire approaching 60. You don’t need to worry about him, his brand, or his reputation. If he cared about it that much, he could’ve stayed at Apple. He chose to move back closer to his family. He didn’t launch a new design firm because he needed it, but because he wanted to.
>> he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success
These are two very different things. You can design a wonderful product but if there isn't a need for it in the market or your business people fail to sell it it can be a failure. Judging design based on sales makes no sense.
> This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.
What has LoveFrom produced in 6 years since Ive quit Apple?
Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple:
I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
I don't think Ron Johnson is really analogous to Ive.
Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard.
Ive, on the other hand, I think is pretty universally recognized as a design genius who was directly responsible for the designs of some of the most important consumer products of the past few decades. Yes, it does seem like Jobs was a critical editor that tempered the worst of Ive's "form over function" tendencies like the butterfly keyboard and removing magsafe, but I think it's fair to say there wouldn't have been an iPhone as it was originally released without Ive.
I feel like Apple still would have had a pretty similar in-store experience even if someone else besides Johnson originally launched it.
Johnson thought he was smarter than everyone else. His success at Apple reshaping the retail experience was a kind of a one-hit-wonder that he then thought would simply be a blueprint for any retail company.
He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else.
The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business:
After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13]
When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14]
Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16]
Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]
that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.
And even people that some people decry as bad and terrible people (for example Elon Musk) still can make amazing leaders that people will willingly drop everything to go work for and who leads them on to achieve great things.
I don't think that's true. Apple Watch? Market leading product. Took something very nerdy and made it fashionable enough that people from all walks of life wear it. Got the form factor so right that even a decade later it has changed very little. Of course there were missteps in the quest for thinness with the laptops but I still preferred my Touch Bar MacBook Pro to any non-Apple laptop I've ever used. If that's the worst he did, that's still better than almost anyone else.
He's still a great designer, the problem though is that without the right kind of editorializing force he'll make mistakes, usually in the form of compromising practicality and functionality for the sake of aesthetics. I should probably clarify that this isn't some fault unique to Jony Ive. It feels like it's common among designers and probably just creative people in general.
Except that freezes Jony in time, as if he didn’t work alongside that editor for decades. I think Jony, like any of us, evolves and picks up new tricks. I’m excited to see what he creates.
Given how messy the model names are and some of the failures like 'GPTs' I get the sense that he's pretty hands-off and mostly focuses on picking the people and then letting them do what they want. Maybe that'll work with Ive, maybe not.
He's very good at doing startup/scaleup management, in a ruthless/snakey skill level. I think that's something everyone can agree.
But vision? I'm not so sure, he had great company and help along the way, and now that he has been left alone (arguably due to his own actions) he's selling the image of competence in areas that he hasn't demonstrated skills whatsoever. We'll see.
OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.
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OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.
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OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”
It's been <20y since YouTube was acquired for $1B, which felt like an imaginary valuation at the time, but it was for a company that actually had traction with users.
Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?
Money is real. Privately held company valuations are not. This is an all-stock deal, so what it's "worth" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running, or how much they can offload to Mayasoshi Son and Arab Gulf sovereign funds.
Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need: io
One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…
I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.
so, here are my specific predictions
1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)
2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface
3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud
4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object
5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)
7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —
The form factor that suggests is an AR headset. Google, Meta, and others have those. They're all flops. Too bulky.
Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
> Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
I agree with the first 2 sentences, but not the last. Everyone and their grandmother knows size and bulkiness are big blockers to VR/AR adoption. But the reason we don't have an Apple Vision Pro in an eyeglasses form factor isn't an issue of design, it's an issue of physics.
Meta seems to have decent success with their Ray Bans, which can basically do all the "ask AI" use cases, but true VR/AR fundamentally require much bulkier devices, most of all for battery life.
I’ve been using #5 for a few weeks now (Limitless.ai pendant, clips to clothes, records and transcribes everything all day)
It sounds cool, and the idea of asking questions about your day seems like it would be cool, but a few weeks later I’m finding myself forgetting to take it with me. The value just isn’t there yet. (And why have a clip on microphone when everyone already has a microphone in our pocket?)
It’s a cool toy though. Also a creepy toy since it can double as an eavesdropping device.
I have a feeling these AI companies will fall back to selling our data for advertising purposes once these companies realize their core products aren’t valuable enough for consumers to want to pay for the cost of it.
(Co-founder & CEO of Limitless) Thanks for trying it and I hope to win you back with the new features we have in the works!
As for selling data if consumers don’t want to pay for it: I commit publicly to never doing this. I will shutdown the company and return remaining capital to investors if consumers don’t want to pay for what we are building. So far, so good, and we were actually cash flow positive a few of the last few weeks.
Amazon Alexa already has this (albeit you need to whisper loud enough for it to hear), and replies in a whisper. It works with any earbuds, but is kinda useless until Alexa+ (LLM integration) is more widely available; and it would be nice to have it reply in a normal voice when using earbuds.
Silent speech recognition is already a thing [0], so pairing it up with an LLM would be straightforward.
What exact use cases do I get from being able to talk to chatGPT when I am out in public? I can think of close to 0 value add to have an AI voice in my head when I'm taking a walk in the park or out to dinner.
People stare at their phones while walking, having dinner, and driving. It's not a big leap to imagine replacing that with subvocal conversations with AI.
A friend of mine is constantly asking it questions everytime something comes up. She opens her phone, loads the app, hits the mic button, then listens with the phone to her ear. Would work a lot better as some sort of device.
I’m as much of a deep Ai skeptic as anyone but I can definitely think of use cases for while driving or walking, like asking questions about my own schedule or what people have emailed or asked me for in the last hour, or where I can get something specific to eat nearby and so on.
Not sure it’s worth the hype but there are use cases. I do think it’s an interesting contrast with crypto, where there aren’t really.
You can participate in more highly intelligent discussions, great for a dinner party or a date or an interview. Everywhere you go you can know it all, many use cases. The people who don’t do it, will be at a severe disadvantage.
There was a guy at MIT who made a silent headset a few years ago. It didn't use brainwaves but rather measured electrical activity in the facial muscles. Apparently when you think in words, there's a slight activation of the same muscles you use to speak.
I was thinking about this problem once and I thought of some sensor to pick up your finger making typing movements but your hands can be in any orientation, i.e. suspended in the air at your sides as you walk.
I use mic input with the chat gpt app in public all the time, if you use a low whisper voice and hold the phone close you can be basically inaudible more than 3 feet away and the TTS still does a great job.
The real challenge, though, is going to be trust and usability. Always-on AI devices listening to whispers, watching context… that’s a privacy tightrope
Yeah this is exactly why I use Grok so much and barely use ChatGPT at all. I always have a device with X on it and it's easy to pop open Grok from anywhere on the site no matter what you're doing as the button is already there.
I can't but wonder though... are we slave to productivity?
What do we need this omnipresent help? I'm sure some people do. If you're CEO of a large company, if you are a doctor seeing hundreds of patients in a week, etc.
But me? An average middle age guy with 9-5 job doing white collar job at healthcare company?
I enjoy doing some things that are 'inefficient'. Is that a really a problem?
Remember hanging out at the pub 20+ years ago? A discussion on who the fastest was, or something (literally what started the Guinness Book of Records) and it would run for a decent time as people mentioned who they thought it was, stories, hearsay evidence.
Now you just whip out your phone, look it up or ask an AI, get the answer and move on.
The second is more informative in a way, but so boring.
The point wasn’t knowing the fact, it was the discussion!
So does openai know how to widen the context window without it taking more money? Otherwise Google wins, again. And this is all boring. Gemini 2.5 pro preview where you can just insert all files you have and actually it doesn't compress and has it in memory is just what you want. All the compression tricks etc really are shit compared. 32k input tokens is a joke now once you tried this.
As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
If raw AI power is the key, Google seems to be in pole position form here on out. They can make their own TPUs, have their own data center. No need to "Stargate" with Oracle and Softbank in tow. Google also has Android, YouTube and G-Suite.
However, OpenAI has been going down the product route for a few years now. After a spout of high-profile research exits it is clear Altman has purged the ranks and can now focus on product development.
So if product is a sufficient USP, and if Altman can deliver a better product, they still have a chance. I guess that is where Ive comes into picture. And Google is notoriously bad at product that is internally developed.
A lot of ifs there. When judging how likely Altman would be to deliver a better product, what other product has he delivered besides an orb that scans your eyeballs in exchange for crypto?
Full attention to 1M context is nonsense. Yes, Gemini can do needle-in-haystack, but do you actually need to feed 1M tokens to find one thing? People who have a lot of experience with using LLM for code generation claim that performance degrades past certain point, even if all context is somewhat-relevant.
What we need is not "long context", we need memory: ability for LLM to address datasets of arbitrary size.
RAG has bad reputation but there's a myriad of different ways for doing RAG. Say, "agentic" tool calls which fetch specific data is essentially a form of RAG. But it's cool because it's not called RAG, right?
Anyway, this definitely requires some innovation, but I doubt "longer context" is exactly what we need.
Our company has development documents, guidelines, api's going back almost 20 years. If you follow them, life is good, if you don't, things don't work. The 20 years is relevant because this is a lot of text + code. When we give this to o3, o4-mini, claude 3.5/7 it just ignores rules randomly; when we give it to gemini 2.5 pro preview, it just works. And after prompting multiple times in chat, the other models just start going into complete nonsense land. We often have cases where it even starts generating code in python while we were working in TS; apparently it compressed it's context so much it forget the actual basics? Not gemini. Haven't been able to mess it up in any practical case yet, which is why, maybe erroneously, attributed that to the context.
4.1 in api already provides 1 million tokens. Anthropic’s enterprise version does too.
I’m not sure if this is a software or a hardware (computer) problem.
Buying a company without a product (or anything announced), without a website, with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.
I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.
> Ive won’t be joining OpenAI, and his design firm, LoveFrom, will continue to be independent, but they will “take over design for all of OpenAI, including its software,” in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion
What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit?
- Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion.
- Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted.
- And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
it’s not true, contemporaneous accounts disprove it (although that’s not to say Sam Altman is not a snake, Sam Altman is a snake that nobody should trust)
Growing up in a strong Southern Christian / Baptist / Pentecostal household [1], WorldCoin feels like the most "Mark of the Beast" plot I've ever seen. 1990's televangelists like John Hagee and Pat Robertson would be screaming to high heaven about Sam Altman being the antichrist if they were still around.
Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!
[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.
The only people I’ve ever known who actually thought Reddit ever really mattered was people in the HN sphere. Anecdata, but still. In terms of value per minute spent, it’s the same tier of slop as TikTok or Instagram, and I think most ordinary people hold that same view.
Really? My perception (and their metrics seem to back this up) is that “normal people” are really on Reddit now. It’s the #7 most visited site in the world. It exploded during the pandemic - not just a site for internet nerds anymore.
My understanding is that there are two types of stock, and the non profit controls the voting stock majority. This cannot be diluted. All other stock gives a (capped) fraction of the profits. This cannot be diluted by these operations, but the cap also can be a bad deal.
That's an interesting point about the different stock classes and voting rights. It adds another layer to how these kinds of acquisitions and valuations might play out in the long run, especially concerning the non-profit's influence. How often are such dual-class stock structures truly effective in maintaining the original mission when large sums and external valuations come into play?
It's interesting I posted exactly this hypothesis an hour or so ago and immediately got flagged despite not being manifestly offensive or anything. Very suspicious.
I want to know why a burner account posted this comment. There could be many reasons, some more entertaining than others. Of course the answer could be boring, but do you care to elaborate?
Man, I remember the absolute hysteria here over the non-profit trying to reign Altman in. You'd have thought they were murdering babies.
I agree with your analysis, but it's hilarious that it's now top-voted, when the sentiment was so negative when the board saw the same thing coming ages ago.
> This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals
I'll add that conventional finance wisdom says that you should only buy companies using stock when you believe your stock is overvalued. That way you get more bang for your buck than cash or undervalued stock.
Readit News
It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor
I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function.
More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.
I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head.
But I guess ego keeps these people going.
He’s a billionaire approaching 60. You don’t need to worry about him, his brand, or his reputation. If he cared about it that much, he could’ve stayed at Apple. He chose to move back closer to his family. He didn’t launch a new design firm because he needed it, but because he wanted to.
These are two very different things. You can design a wonderful product but if there isn't a need for it in the market or your business people fail to sell it it can be a failure. Judging design based on sales makes no sense.
What has LoveFrom produced in 6 years since Ive quit Apple?
Dead Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)
I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).
Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard.
Ive, on the other hand, I think is pretty universally recognized as a design genius who was directly responsible for the designs of some of the most important consumer products of the past few decades. Yes, it does seem like Jobs was a critical editor that tempered the worst of Ive's "form over function" tendencies like the butterfly keyboard and removing magsafe, but I think it's fair to say there wouldn't have been an iPhone as it was originally released without Ive.
I feel like Apple still would have had a pretty similar in-store experience even if someone else besides Johnson originally launched it.
He never had any success post-Apple like you say, but it wasn't because there wasn't any "insurance man". For me, I see it as a guy who found something worked smashingly, so he just assumed it would work everywhere else.
The stuff he pulled at JC Penny is a master class in what NOT to do in business:
After his success at Apple and Target, Johnson was hired as chief executive officer by JCPenney in November 2011, succeeding Mike Ullman, who had been CEO for the preceding seven years. Ullman then was chairman of the board of directors, but was relieved of his duties in January 2013. Bill Ackman, a JCPenney board member and head of hedge fund Pershing Square supported bringing in Johnson to shake up the store's stodgy image and attract new customers. Johnson was given $52.7 million when he joined JCPenney, and he made a $50 million personal investment in the company. After being hired, Johnson tapped Michael Kramer, an Apple Store veteran, as chief operating officer while firing many existing JCPenney executives.[11][12][13]
When Johnson announced his transformation vision in late January 2012, JCPenney's stock rose 24 percent to $43.[14] Johnson's actual execution, however, was described as "one of the most aggressively unsuccessful tenures in retail history". While his rebranding effort was ambitious, he was said to have "had no idea about allocating and conserving resources and core customers. He made promises neither his stores nor his cash flows would allow him to keep". Similar to what he had done at Apple, Johnson did not consider a staged roll-out, instead he "immediately rejected everything existing customers believed about the chain and stuffed it in their faces" with the first major TV ad campaign under his watch. Johnson defended his strategy, saying that "testing would have been impossible because the company needed quick results and that if he hadn’t taken a strong stance against discounting, he would not have been able to get new, stylish brands on board."[12][14]
Many of the initiatives that were successful at the Apple Stores, for instance the "thought that people would show up in stores because they were fun places to hang out, and that they would buy things listed at full-but-fair price" did not work for the JCPenney brand and ended up alienating its customers who were used to heavy discounting. By eliminating the thrill of pursuing markdowns, the "fair and square every day" pricing strategy disenfranchised JCPenney's traditional customer base.[15] Johnson himself was said "to have a disdain for JCPenney’s traditional customer base." When shoppers were not reacting positively to the disappearance of coupons and sales, Johnson did not blame the new policies. Instead, he offered the assessment that customers needed to be "educated" as to how the new pricing strategy worked. He also likened the coupons beloved by so many core shoppers as drugs that customers needed to be weaned off."[11][12][13] While head of JCPenney, Johnson continued to live in California and commuted to work in Plano, Texas by private jet several days a week.[16]
Throughout 2012, sales continued to sag dramatically. In the fourth quarter of the 2012 fiscal year, same-store sales dropped 32%, which led some to call it "the worst quarter in retail history."[17] On April 8, 2013, he was fired as the CEO of JCPenney and replaced by his predecessor, Mike Ullman.[18][19]
But Ive post-jobs just doesn’t have the same track record. He’s had a few years, maybe he’s learned and matured. I hope so.
He's had 6 years to create something—anything!—so far
But vision? I'm not so sure, he had great company and help along the way, and now that he has been left alone (arguably due to his own actions) he's selling the image of competence in areas that he hasn't demonstrated skills whatsoever. We'll see.
Nobody says what kind of hardware. A wearable is the likely bet. Maybe a home robot, but that's a few years out.
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OpenAI said it already owns a 23% stake in io from a prior collaborative agreement signed late last year. It says it will now pay $5 billion in equity for the acquisition.
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OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and LoveFrom will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”
https://apnews.com/article/jony-ive-openai-chatgpt-52c72786e...
Dead Comment
Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?
One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…
I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.
so, here are my specific predictions
1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)
2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface
3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud
4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object
5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.
6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)
7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —
Carmack has said that for VR/AR to get any traction, the headgear needs to come down to swim goggle size, and to go mainstream, it has to come down to eyeglass size. He's probably right. Ive would be the kind of guy to push in that direction.
I agree with the first 2 sentences, but not the last. Everyone and their grandmother knows size and bulkiness are big blockers to VR/AR adoption. But the reason we don't have an Apple Vision Pro in an eyeglasses form factor isn't an issue of design, it's an issue of physics.
Meta seems to have decent success with their Ray Bans, which can basically do all the "ask AI" use cases, but true VR/AR fundamentally require much bulkier devices, most of all for battery life.
Deleted Comment
I feel like the most natural thing would be basically push-to-talk-to-AI:
1. Some sort of mic + earpiece that you can wear comfortably(e.g. airpods)
2. A wireless button that you can put on a ring to activate the mic in the most ergonomic way possible
3. Any time you press the button, everything you say gets sent to a running AI chat
Like a pin. With AI. And it would talk to you like a human, so we could call it the Humane AI Pin.
How did nobody thought about that?
It sounds cool, and the idea of asking questions about your day seems like it would be cool, but a few weeks later I’m finding myself forgetting to take it with me. The value just isn’t there yet. (And why have a clip on microphone when everyone already has a microphone in our pocket?)
It’s a cool toy though. Also a creepy toy since it can double as an eavesdropping device.
I have a feeling these AI companies will fall back to selling our data for advertising purposes once these companies realize their core products aren’t valuable enough for consumers to want to pay for the cost of it.
As for selling data if consumers don’t want to pay for it: I commit publicly to never doing this. I will shutdown the company and return remaining capital to investors if consumers don’t want to pay for what we are building. So far, so good, and we were actually cash flow positive a few of the last few weeks.
So like a smartphone in your pocket connected to an earphone.
The whisper thing is nice. Sounds like a feature for next gen earphones.
Amazon Alexa already has this (albeit you need to whisper loud enough for it to hear), and replies in a whisper. It works with any earbuds, but is kinda useless until Alexa+ (LLM integration) is more widely available; and it would be nice to have it reply in a normal voice when using earbuds.
Silent speech recognition is already a thing [0], so pairing it up with an LLM would be straightforward.
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10411110
Not sure it’s worth the hype but there are use cases. I do think it’s an interesting contrast with crypto, where there aren’t really.
I'll set alerts, an alarm, write on my hand, etc. and still forget that e.g. my kids have a half-day tomorrow… even when medicated.
I'd love to have a little voice in my head periodically reminding me of these things.
https://samueli.ucla.edu/speaking-without-vocal-cords-thanks...
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I can't but wonder though... are we slave to productivity?
What do we need this omnipresent help? I'm sure some people do. If you're CEO of a large company, if you are a doctor seeing hundreds of patients in a week, etc.
But me? An average middle age guy with 9-5 job doing white collar job at healthcare company?
I enjoy doing some things that are 'inefficient'. Is that a really a problem?
Now you just whip out your phone, look it up or ask an AI, get the answer and move on.
The second is more informative in a way, but so boring.
The point wasn’t knowing the fact, it was the discussion!
No. They need all the data from your life.
They need to see what you see (camera somewhere), hear what you hear (hello microphones) and probably even more.
My bet is on some sort of tablet. Maybe kind of a book, or kindle, or something like that.
As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.
If raw AI power is the key, Google seems to be in pole position form here on out. They can make their own TPUs, have their own data center. No need to "Stargate" with Oracle and Softbank in tow. Google also has Android, YouTube and G-Suite.
However, OpenAI has been going down the product route for a few years now. After a spout of high-profile research exits it is clear Altman has purged the ranks and can now focus on product development.
So if product is a sufficient USP, and if Altman can deliver a better product, they still have a chance. I guess that is where Ive comes into picture. And Google is notoriously bad at product that is internally developed.
What we need is not "long context", we need memory: ability for LLM to address datasets of arbitrary size.
RAG has bad reputation but there's a myriad of different ways for doing RAG. Say, "agentic" tool calls which fetch specific data is essentially a form of RAG. But it's cool because it's not called RAG, right?
Anyway, this definitely requires some innovation, but I doubt "longer context" is exactly what we need.
I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.
This industry is amazing.
What do you mean?
> Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI
Dead Comment
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
Relevant thread where Sam acknowledges the plan.
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/3cs78i/whats_the...
Such an insufferable response.
Transacting with your eyeball? Directly out of the Book of Revelations!
[1] I took a strong interest in biochemistry in college and I'm no longer religious.
Nope [1].
1: https://world.org/
Only if you go there for rage bait content.
Small subs are better than ever. And no Lemmy is not an alternative.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44054452
Did the non-profit buy io using shares of the for-profit that it owns? Or did the for-profit buy io using its own shares?
I agree with your analysis, but it's hilarious that it's now top-voted, when the sentiment was so negative when the board saw the same thing coming ages ago.
I'll add that conventional finance wisdom says that you should only buy companies using stock when you believe your stock is overvalued. That way you get more bang for your buck than cash or undervalued stock.