Apple designer Jony Ive and Sam Altman team up for AI hardware

A Fusion of Design and Technology

Jony Ive, the former chief design officer of Apple, and Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, are working on a secret project to create a new kind of hardware for the age of artificial intelligence (AI). The project is part of Ive’s design firm LoveFrom, which he co-founded with fellow designer Marc Newson in 2019 after leaving Apple. Ive has hired Tang Tan, Apple’s lead designer for the iPhone and Apple Watch, to join LoveFrom and work on the AI hardware project with OpenAI, the research company backed by Microsoft and other tech giants.

What is LoveFrom?

LoveFrom is a creative collective of designers, architects, musicians, filmmakers, writers, engineers, and artists. According to its official website, LoveFrom.com, the collective is “obsessed with traditions of creating and making”, “fanatically devoted to excellence”, and “insatiably curious”. LoveFrom collaborates with leaders and founders, works on projects for joy, and develops its own ideas. The name of the firm comes from a quote by Steve Jobs, who said that “the products we make are a form of self-expression, and they come from a place of love”.

Who is Tang Tan?

Tang Tan is a veteran product designer at Apple, who has been responsible for making critical decisions about the design and engineering of the iPhone, the Apple Watch, and the AirPods. Tan joined Apple in 2006 and became the vice president of product design in 2018, reporting to John Ternus, the senior vice president of hardware engineering. Tan is credited with turning the AirPods and the Apple Watch into major growth drivers for Apple, as well as contributing to the design of the iPhone X, the first iPhone with a full-screen display and Face ID. Tan announced his departure from Apple in December 2023, and will join LoveFrom in February 2024.

What other projects has OpenAI worked on?

OpenAI is a research organization that aims to ensure that artificial intelligence is aligned with human values and can be used for the benefit of all. Founded in 2015 by a group of entrepreneurs and visionaries, including Elon Musk and Sam Altman, OpenAI has received funding from Microsoft, Reid Hoffman, Khosla Ventures, and others. OpenAI has worked on various projects and products that showcase the potential and challenges of AI, such as:

Gym: A platform for developing and comparing reinforcement learning algorithms.
RoboSumo: A game where two robots compete to push each other out of a ring.
OpenAI Five: A team of five neural networks that learned to play the complex strategy game Dota 2 and defeated some of the world’s top professional players.
GPT-1, 2, 3, and 4: A series of generative pre-trained models that can produce natural language texts on various topics and tasks, such as answering questions, writing essays, composing emails, and creating code.
Codex: A language model for code generation that can translate natural language descriptions into executable code in various programming languages.
Whisper: A speech recognition system that uses large-scale weak supervision to learn from noisy and unlabeled data.
MuseNet and Jukebox: Generative models for music that can create original compositions and remixes in different styles and genres.
Microscope: A collection of visualizations of the features learned by vision models.
DALL-E and CLIP: Generative models for images that can create and classify novel images based on natural language inputs.
ChatGPT: A conversational agent that can chat with humans on various topics, using GPT-3 as the underlying model.

The AI hardware project that LoveFrom and OpenAI are working on is still shrouded in mystery, but some sources have speculated that it could be an OpenAI smartphone, which would integrate ChatGPT and other AI technologies. However, this is just speculation and no concrete details have been revealed yet.

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The collaboration between Jony Ive, Sam Altman, and Tang Tan is a remarkable convergence of design, engineering, and AI expertise. The trio has a track record of creating innovative and influential products and services, and their AI hardware project could be the next big thing in the tech industry. However, the project also faces many challenges and uncertainties, such as the technical feasibility, the ethical implications, and the market demand for such a device. It remains to be seen what the outcome of this ambitious venture will be, and whether it will live up to the expectations of its creators and consumers.

Amy H