> OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.
Because it sounds like the CEO of OpenAI wants to use investor's money to buy his other company.
Too bad we can't short it or otherwise stop it, because investment for the things we could start will dry up once the world figures this out. We're all correlated to companies like FTX whether we like them or not...
Depending on who is doing the valuation, I'm sure this is already a consideration. Like when Coinbase acquired Earn for $110m-ish. Was Earn worth that? Absolutely not. Since Coinbase and Earn shared investors, it was merely a convenient way for those investors to pay themselves out of the unexpected billion dollar cash pile Coinbase amassed in 2017.
Dividend means taxes . Buyback requires someone to sell (I.e. exit) usually no one wants[1] to especially when the company is going hot. investors would rather have (more)stock in a hot company than cash.
Fund managers and staff have also disincentives for early exits, i.e. they have to find and invest in another company and cannot just keep the money, which means more work. They rather exit by switching stock to a hotter in demand, hard to get in companies if they can.
[1] there are always some employees and founders who would prefer some liquidity , but either they don’t hold large enough positions (employees) or investors don’t want to give a lot of liquidity (founders)
For public companies it is different- buybacks work because there is always someone ready to sell. Usually retail but also short term funds who don’t care about liquidating. ETFs and other very institutional investors or those into buffet style long term investments will not sell easily
Sam and Elon are both ethically dubious power players who seem to be really good at inside dealing to benefit themselves, while all the other people in their companies just have to deal with it.
As I write this out, it reminds me of another polarizing leader who has been really good at being in the news every day for the last 6 months, and for a 4 year period a decade ago.
There's only one Jony Ive and alot of demand from the company with the deepest pockets in town ...
UX will make or break any major new AI product - especially hardware. The price is steep but I think it's actually a sensible move. There really aren't that many other people with the proven ability to deliver when it comes to UX at scale for novel areas.
The first step in AI delivering a good UX might be coming up with a logo that doesn't look like a butthole. Unfortunately this seems to be an impossible task.
Jony Ive is a designer verses Tony Fadell who is a hardware guy.
Ive is a very talented artist but AI is not being held back by people unwilling to courageously make things thinner and thinner.
I would imagine Ive looked at an Apple HomePod and thought “we could make this beautifully flat and hang it on the wall of every room in the house”. This might be a good idea but it in no way solves the major problems with AI/LLMs.
Because they’re not paying with money. It’s $6.5B of pure equity in a private company that they’ve decided to value at $300B based off of… vibes or hopes or whatever?
This announcement furthers my sense OpenAI is becoming a hype vehicle destined to be the iconic poster child of early AI hubris when the bubble pops. When I read the pretentious marketing copy and photo on the announcement page my first thought was "Someday this'll be linked on the Wikipedia page for 'The AI Bubble'".
I'm not even a hardcore AI skeptic, I think AI can be useful and valuable in the near-term (even outside coding!) and potentially transformative in the long-term but I also think current capabilities are over-hyped and wildly overvalued. I think AI is going through the typical hype cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle) and we're currently late in the "Inflated Expectations" phase soon to be followed by the inevitable "Trough of Disillusionment".
Deffinately a contender for one of the creepiest photos in the industry.
Not something that inspires confidence in the "Design Prowess" of the acquisition if this is what they felt best represented them.
The quotes at the bottom are funny because they have a share link which implies that Sam and Jony thought they were insightful enough that people would want to actively share them. Even in the extreme tech crowd, who would share those?
I wasn't gonna check the link at first but you've convinced me, and holy shit that image of the two of them that greets you first thing is beyond hilarious.
You truly couldn't make this up, it's so beyond parody that I don't even know what to say. It's so palpably psychotic.
Altman: "Jony was running a design firm called LoveFrom that had established itself as really the densest collection of talent that I've ever heard of in one place AND HAS PROBABLY EVER EXISTED IN THE WORLD."
I felt physically sick from second-hand embarrassment watching this.
German has a word for second hand embarrassment. Fremdschämen. Comes in very handy here. If Sam continues like this it won’t be long until it becomes part of the regular English language like other German words such as Kindergarten.
And I’ll be happy that I don’t have to explain Fremdschämen anymore. Everything has its upsides.
Somehow when the buzz-word machine found talent density, half the passengers forgot that density has a denominator. I see this goof a lot. If you accept the premise that Jony is literally the most talented human in the entire history of the world (I know I know), then obviously he was more dense sitting in a room alone, than after being diluted by hiring 50 other people.
Secondly, is it a weird Sora-stitchedc video? It feels like they just filmed their parts separately like they're not even talking to each other/interacting with each other. Very peculiar.
It uses the same overhype playbook from the Segway launch: "Oh, I used the [unnamed, unexplained] device and it was the most amazing thing in the whole of human history!" "This object will cause the entire planet to be redesigned around it!"
No question that Ive is a legend, but I do think the fall of Humane (also ex-Apple) and the challenges at Meta, Apple, and Google in terms of VR/AR adoption (Meta Ray Ban, Apple Vision, Google Glasses and the new thing) are instructive here. The $6.5B almost feels like the largest ever aquihire.
But Meta is thriving with Meta Ray Bans, they have sold over 2M as of few months back. (Yes I know that number seems small compared to other devices, but for a new form factor, that seems like a great early success)
The glasses with a HUD are a different product line, latest ray bans are just camera mic and audio, but I still count them as AR because the AI voice in your ear can see what you see. I tried them for a few months and returned them, not a good enough camera to enjoy the hands free snapshots I was looking forward to, and just didn’t have a use for a q&a bot attached to my ear.
For what they are I’ll give them props for a nicely designed product, the charging case is clever and works well. I liked them for music with the Apple Watch, pretty slick combination. Maybe if I could stomach giving a llama bot access to email and calendar etc etc to have a real personal assistant it would be an attractive offering in a world that accepts being watched 24/7 by AI/billionaire overlords
> Maybe if I could stomach giving a llama bot access to email and calendar etc etc to have a real personal assistant it would be an attractive offering in a world that accepts being watched 24/7 by AI/billionaire overlords
I share this general point of view but take it further: I really want something in this direction (a quality AI assistant that can access my communications and continuously see and hear what I do) but it MUST be local and fully controlled by me. I feel like Meta is getting closest to offering what I'm looking for but I would never in a million years trust them with any of my data.
My wife has the first-gen raybans and they're great for taking photos and video clips of e.g. our kids' sporting events and concerts, where what it's replacing is a phone held up above the crowd getting in the way of the moment. But even with that I feel icky uploading those things to Meta's servers.
AR can surely be audio only. Or are you suggesting a blind person getting navigation instructions via cameras and speakers isn't augmenting their reality? If so, I violently disagree.
Meta Ray Bans and Googles Project Aura are products that I absolutely want, but absolutely don't want to buy them from either of those companies, or any company as invasive as they are.
It's long past time for enhanced privacy regulation in the North American market because these products are going to be wildly invasive as people depend on them to mediate their experience with the world. I don't know what the right answer, and I am very much aware that building products like these that don't focus on monetizing user interaction and advertising would likely mean that they are priced out for lower income users, but I hope someone smarter than me can figure it out :S
Meta Ray Bans and Googles Project Aura are products that I absolutely want, but absolutely don't want to buy them from either of those companies, or any company as invasive as they are.
This! So much this! If a product from these companies could make my life 1,000,000x better I would still be in “thanks but no thanks crowd”
To quote from the article regarding Humane and the Rabbit r1 personal assistant device: “Those were very poor products,” said Ive, 58. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”
To quote myself: "Jony Ive made incredibly poor products his last years at Apple" - So his opinion of what constitutes a "poor product" is suspect (R1 and Humane were bad products but just because you can tell what is a bad product doesn't mean you can make a good one).
I don't know anything about Humane, but the Rabbit was a terrible product right from the start. It was viewed overwhelmingly negatively as soon as it was unveiled.
> If they were so obviously bad at the time, how did they get to market?
I'm not sure what "they" is here (Humane, Rabbit, or late-Ive-era Apple designs).
In all cases though there were plenty of people sounding the alarm. Both Humane and Rabbit were made fun of (wasn't in Humane's demo that the AI was completely wrong about guess the amount of almonds or the calories?). As for Apple products it was a common refrain that they were being made thin at the cost of ports/cooling/etc. How did Apple keep doubling down on the butterfly keyboard _years_ after it was well known it was a bad design?
Also, "The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." (re: how did they get to market). You can do anything if you set enough money on fire, no matter how many people are telling you it's a bad idea.
Not sure why he deserves to be a legend, to be honest, but yes, he is a legend.
He did a good job, but those small and minimalistic designs were only possible because of the efforts of entire teams of engineers, of which the public never heard anything.
And many of those designs were made at Ive's behest, against the wishes of entire teams of engineers. I feel like we have his "courage" to blame for the Butterfly keyboard, terrible Mac thermals and the lack of ports on "Pro" computers.
Your 2019 Macbook also uses a different chassis, designed by Jony Ive. Apple knew it throttled the chips they used but shipped it anyways, presumably because Ive liked his thinness even when it results in a bendgate.
You'll note that Macbooks don't quite look the same after Ive left and his influence went away.
Beefier. Bulkier. Quick google search says Intel 16" was 4.3 lbs whereas M4 16" is 4.7 lbs. Not a big difference you say but 1) it is going in the opposite direction where the newer product is bulkier and 2) imagine the years of thin-ness that would have been forced under a different regime.
Blaming Intel is a poor excuse. Apple could have done some actual design and built a laptop around the hardware they had. But they didn't want to. Instead, they ignored the reality, stuck to the flawed design, and shipped mediocre laptops several years in a row.
Apple had the design ready for an Intel chips that didn't arrive. Rather than revisiting their design they opted to just chuck the chip into a design that couldn't accommodate it's thermal characteristics.
I spent way too much time figuring out that around 53W is the maximum that the last Intel MBP can sustain over longer periods before the VRM (converts power for the CPU) poops out and throttles you.
I agree, but I think they didn't care. For some years, some Apple execs believed that the iPad was going to replace the Mac. After that they knew that the Apple Silicon Mac was nearby, so they probably didn't want to make an investment in a 'legacy' platform. Did suck for all the people who bought one.
I've never had an Intel laptop work well in the efficiency and thermal department, Apple or not. I used to blame Apple too, but seeing the difference, it's hard to argue who the main culprit was. Can't design around a bad foundation.
Perhaps, but pretty much every high performance Intel laptop between 2017 and 2023 is exactly the same unless it's in an heavy, enormous and unpleasantly loud gaming chassis. Supposedly the Core Ultra Series 2 are an improvement but I haven't tried one yet.
For a while, you could get the thermals a bit more tolerable by undervolting them, but then the plundervolt mitigations blocked that.
(Typing this comment from a Lenovo X1 Extreme sitting on a cooling pad, sat next to an X1 Carbon that we can't use because it throttles too much. :)
Apple is generally really good at trying to keep their machines silent. When they originally transitioned to Intel, their Core 2 Duo laptops were both cheaper and more silent than the competition. As a Linux user, that's one feature from Apple I'd like most manufacturers to copy.
Regarding your X1, tweaking Linux kernel parameters and downvolting a bit can work wonders in terms of reaching an pleasant heat : performance ratio. Obviously, Lenovo should have taken care of this. However, they release so many different machines that it's hard for them to pay attention to details.
It’s a company laptop that runs Windows, and the newer BIOSes now block undervolting because of the plundervolt mitigations.
I replaced the thermal paste with some of that PTM stuff which helped a bit, but not enough. I also found that for some reason it tends to BDPROCHOT-throttle when powered through the official Thunderbolt 4 Workstation Dock, even though it’s meant to be 230W and provides power separately to the USB port - but using the standalone AC adapter when docked fixes that.
Ultimately, until there are some decent X86-64 laptops released, the choice is between slow, thin and quiet vs less slow, but big, heavy and noisy. AMD is a bit better than Intel but still weak on mobile and nowhere near as good as the current Apple offerings.
On another note, why are PC manufacturers still putting fan intakes on the bottom. Maybe it’s theoretically more efficient, but tell that to my users who always do things like resting their laptop on a book then wondering why their Zoom screen sharing goes jittery.
I had the butterfly keyboard for 5 years yet I didn't have a single problem with it. And I'm a long time mechanical keyboards user. What is all the hate about?
That's luck on your side. I too own a butterfly keyboard, trouble free. But there were 50 other macs in the office I worked in that regularly had issues. They were unreliable as hell, and beyond the reliability issue, many people did not like the shorter travel distance (I didn't mind this at all myself).
I felt the same way when I used it. But recently I booted up an old laptop with the butterfly keys and I was like "ewwww" as soon as I started typing on them. They worked. But what we have now is more comfortable.
Many people (more than the average rate for the prior generations) _did_ have problems. Perhaps more importantly, the only way to address those problems when they arose was to replace not only the keyboard itself but the entire top case of the machine due to the way the parts were integrated. This process costed many hundreds of dollars when the machines were out of warranty, and the company eventually acquiesced to social pressure and lawsuits by creating an extended warranty program.
That's not to say your situation is unique...there are probably many machines out there that have not had problems, including one owned by my wife. But there are also an unusually high number of machines that did.
I'm a native English speaker and nobody told me this (and I didn't manage to pick it up) until I was nearly 40. "Cost"'s past tense is also "cost."
There's another, newer, largely fatuous, verbed "cost" that means "to calculate the cost of something." That's the one that gets used in the past tense ("the projects have all been costed.")
"I've costed a keyboard replacement for my computer, and the total is more than the computer cost in the first place."
I had the first generation on a MacBook 12" and had no issues at all. Then I got the second generation on a MacBook Pro (I think this was still without the dust seals) and it was one big misery. A small speck of dust would make a key feel bad or get stuck. I was so happy when I could finally get rid of the stupid device. Never had issues with Apple Scissor switches thereafter.
I'd get a particularly large molecule lodged under a key and then I couldn't press that key consistently anymore until I managed to flush it out. It was OK when it worked, but it didn't work enough.
Don't forget the Apple Mouse with the lightning port under the mouse so you can't use it while it charges. It's still the only Apple product with a design that makes me physically cringe.
I also find it awkward and uncomfortable to use, but that might just be me.
When I had that Apple mouse, I kept around a separate wired mouse to use when it inevitably ran out of charge while I was in the middle of work. I won't just stop what I am doing just because Apple wants me to not use a mouse with the cord plugged in.
The almost two decades before he made great designs. I have always felt it went downhill after Jobs was not there anymore to provide a counter force to Ive's design tendencies. It's like taking one of John or Paul away.
Ive did good designs when Jobs kept him in check. Once Jobs was gone he messed up a whole generation of MacBooks. Things got much better after his departure.
I think after Jobs, Ive did all sorts of things just to justify his presence at Apple. Hence trying to make an already well-designed product even more "well-designed", but to his terms. And that's when it started turning to shit.
HN isn't special here. There's conflict between people whose job is to make something look pretty and people whose job is to make it work in every industry.
For Ive, it often was. Ever thinner MBPs? Why, if not for appearance given the weight didn't change. No ports on PRO computers? Why, if they didn't bother his aesthetic sensibilities. Charging your mouse disables its use because the ports on the bottom? Why if not to hide the port for looks? He spent most of his time at Apple trying to make things pretty. Your comment may be true for "design" in the abstract, but as someone who spent plenty of time studying design and architecture, let me assure you, many of the people I studied with who are now industry veterans never cared about much more than aesthetics, even in architecture where engineering and building science are major factors. Again, sure, theoretically true for "design" but hardly true for Ive.
Alternatively: Form follows function.
Or: Good design takes into account the medium.
Many forms of saying it or a very similar statement. If only these words transformed into something beneficial in the minds of flying air castle designers.
> I absolutely despise comments like these, and you only see them on HN.
Unfortunately the progressives have been pushing the downplaying of powerful people quite hard for a long time under the guise of equality, so it’s more widespread than just HN. Even more unfortunately, equality is also one of the main ideas of communism. It’s how the government can get rid of dissenters and thus move power to itself. That’s why Marc Andreessen in the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how the government told them that they could give up their startup because it was already decided which companies would be allowed to operate. That’s not capitalism. And Marc knows it that’s why he felt he had to speak up.
Comments like yours that completely dismiss any questioning of established "legends" seems more despicable to me. Can't we have an open discussion and a range of opinions?
I agree somewhat, you can feel the tension on HN with respect to labor vs capital. Which is funny because the entire premise of YC is to infuse capital and get a huge leverage over bootstrappers.
It's a pretty common turn of phrase on "lefty" (Western, English, very online, progressive) parts of the internet. I've always found it silly because it takes some pretty interesting nuanced problems (how do you give credit to folks who executed Ive's vision, many who probably boldly innovated to create what they did? How do you realistically situate Ive's flaws given his aura?) and wrings the nuance out of it by polarizing the readers (you're either with labor or you're with capital, pick your side of the picket line!)
But then these days lefty and righty parts of the Western English-language internet are all polarized and beating on common enemies is part of their conversational language. I think for a while HN was small enough that it resisted this polarization but at its current size there's no escaping it.
You're most likely to get credit by being unique and irreplaceable. In other words, if the work would not have happened without you. If someone else could have been easily hired to do the work you contributed, and if in that case the work would have been largely indistinguishable from the work you did, then you're essentially fungible.
IMO you still deserve credit. And in fact you still get credit. But that credit comes in the form of monetary reward and (hopefully) recognition from your team and peers, rather than in the form of fame.
All of which… seems sensible to me? Hard to imagine it working otherwise. Interestingly, the movie industry has normalized "end credits" which play after a movie ends, and which lists literally everyone involved, which is quite cool. But the effect is still the same, the people up top get 99.99% of the credit.
(Ofc the "system" is imperfect, and fame/credit can be gamed by good marketers. But it's also not a "system" that any one party invented, it's just sort of an organic economy of attention at work.)
I am not sure what you're trying to say here. I agree that the existing situation is the most likely one. So what? I am simply saying that even though it is the "obvious thing", it is unfair and unkind. Those two things are compatible, in fact they are the usual arrangement of things!
> Hard to imagine it working otherwise.
No it isn't! It's very easy to imagine crediting people in a different ratio than we happen to do now. You are seeing what it looks like - people mythologise their heroes, and then other people come in and say "they didn't do it all, you know". People are literally doing it, in front of you, in this thread. How can it be hard to imagine?
When I say "I can't imagine" or "it's hard to image" I don't mean that literally. Obviously in reality I can imagine and it's easy to imagine, as evidenced by my example of movie credits.
What I'm saying is that it's not realistic. Humans are wired to remember and share highly specific things, especially names. It's been like this since the dawn of time -- the Illiad is about Achilles, not all the nameless soldiers. So this seems to be the natural order of things, rather than something designed, or something easy to change. And it makes sense, because it's practical -- our memories are limited. You can put everyone's names in the credits, but that doesn't mean they'll be remembered and shared.
Yeah, let's also give credit to the building materials and mother nature. Let's give credit to the pedestrians who walked by the construction site every day and decided not to commit arson.
Brilliant logic. And no, the original comment wasnt' saying "give the engineers some credit", it was saying the engineers deserve the credit instead of Ive.
Which is idiotic and common of smug, self-important programmers.
In between great architects and construction workers there are structural engineers who have to work out how to turn the pretty designs into actual, workable plans. Those are the guys who should get most of the credit.
It's also the same dude who brought us beloved products in Apple's lineup. It's almost a meme at this point to say that Jony Ive's genius needs a containing force like Steve Jobs. Perhaps Sam Altman can fill that role.
Jobs, for all his faults, understood where aesthetic, functionality and user experience intersected extremely well.
He got stuff wrong too, don’t get me wrong, but I have yet to see another CEO (heck any business person of note) with the same pattern of deep understanding of how those things intersected as well as he did
People say this while outright ignoring all the outright failures Jobs had because he DIDN'T have that understanding.
The Lisa, the Newton, NeXT computers, trying to dump Pixar pretty much right before they made it big right as the tech was finally catching up to their ideas.
The reality is Jobs got to roll the dice a bunch of times, and if you get to roll the dice a lot, you will have some wins. Looking only at the wins is not useful.
I don't have the time or space to write up a proper rebuttal, but I will suffice to say, after reading an incredible amount about not only Jobs, but Apple, NeXT, the Newton, Pixar, things about tech, especially early home computing, the man performed well above his peers with regards to where aesthetic, functionality and user experience intersected. Note, I am not talking about how he ran the businesses otherwise.
He wasn't always right, as I said already, but he was far better than most at this. More importantly, he was far better at most at getting others to shave their vision down to the simplest of ideas.
If you look at the competitors to Apple or NeXT during their respective eras, they were not very thoughtful in their deliberations.
It doesn't mean every idea he had was successful either, but I'm speaking specifically to the fact he intersected the three points extremely well. At a certain point, someone is good enough at something its more than luck
Agreed. It's hard to think of a new product category for smart devices ... unless maybe Smart HATS! OK folks so remember where you heard it first - ultra stylish head gear with flip-down visor screen anyone?
True, I guess they will innovate around devices and periferals that enable or facilitate AI powered activities, and hope to pioneer a new category of activity, and look damn cool at the same time.
Humane was very impressive product from hardware perspective and design but poor execution and software (partially because they don't own smartphone os like android/iOS).
If similar hardware was:
- released by apple or google and deeply integrated with android/iOS
- embedded inside apple watch / pixel watch
- embedded inside slim airpods case that could be wear as pendant
- apple had siri as good as gemini and very good local STT to reduce latency
- MCP clients got more adopted by integrated in smartphones AI assistants
then it could be a hit. They lost because they shipped to early, without having big pockets for long game, without owning android OS / iOS and charged big price + subscription for this gadgets.
I think google currently is the best positioned to pull seamless experience with pixel devices (smartphone, watch, buds, gemini)
I'm also struggling to find the website for Ive's company that is being acquired for $6.5 billion. Maybe I'm just slow today, but does the company being acquired have a website?
Yes, in the video on OpenAI's website, they reference a product that Altman is testing at home created by Ive.
No, we can't see it yet. And there's not much description, either. Just that it's the "coolest technology that the world will have ever seen."
Altman: "We have like magic intelligence in the cloud. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now, about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen. I would like reach down, I would get on my laptop, I'd open it up, I'd launch a web browser, I'd start typing, and I'd have to like explain that thing, and I would hit enter, and I would wait and I would get a response. And that it as the current limit of what a current laptop can do."
The above is very r/wheredidthesoda go but it hints at the product being ambient computing related.
Apple is failing horrible at “AI” currently but I don’t see what the big deal with Jony Ive is in 2025. He had a massive (if not single-handed) impact on some of the _worst_ hardware Apple has ever shipped, thinner, thinner, thinner to the product’s detriment and butterfly keyboards. I lay that all at Ive’s feet.
you must really have an axe to grind, you've commented three times on the same article with how much you hate ive. you're right his later work was a little frustrating, but he's also the same guy who brought you the ipod, the iphone, the ipad, the apple watch, and airpods. maybe he's not batting 1000 but the level of vitriol here is striking.
I never said I hate him, I think his is massively over-hyped, and I just think it's insanity that people think that since he had success earlier in his life that everything he touches is gold. It's a common theme of people thinking any successful business person must be worth listening to in other aspects of life (see: people treating billionaires like they are genius'), a stupid theme but a common one.
how else would you evaluate a designer if not by their track record?
ive has a proven track record of conceptualizing and delivering category defining products. isn't that exactly the skill set that would be called for in this case? if not, what criteria would you apply?
I am using his track record, most people seem to only be looking at his earlier work.
Imagine I told you I had a top tier developer, they built this amazing system but in the last 5-10 years their ideas have not panned out and been actively harmful/misguided. Does that sound like someone you want to hire? Yes, they did amazing things in the past but recent history tells a different story.
It might be one thing if Ive left Apple and started turning out just amazing products, but that has not been the case.
The ability for a CEO to be a founder of another company and then buy that company with the company he is a CEO of seems incredibly sketchy. See also: bullshit idea that someone can actually run multiple companies, it’s ceo welfare and vanity titles.
No one is forcing you to invest in said companies. As an investor it's up to you to do due diligence on the board, conflict of interest disclosures, whether sizeable acquisitions require shareholder approval, etc.
This is on top of blanket legal protections that already exist in case you didn't want to do your own DD, like duty of loyalty, care and fiduciary; SEC disclosures, AD @ the DoJ, FTC, etc.
Although “you” is often used to refer to a specific person or persons (e.g., “How did you get to work today?”), in many languages, it can also be used to refer to people in general (e.g., “You avoid rush hour if you can.”).
I think the concept is more like, you may participate (invest) but if you don't, you have no standing to have an opinion. (other than the fact that you didn't invest, which represents your opinion.)
> if you don't, you have no standing to have an opinion.
Are you saying that they're saying something stupid? The vast majority of companies are regulated by non-investors; and when companies are regulated by people who are also investors, we think it is a problem rather than a requirement for the regulators to have an opinion.
A regulator's job is the protect the public interest, nothing more. Certainly not shareholder interest, except to the extent that it overlaps with the public interest. They don't run the company and they don't make decisions for the company or stop decisions because something might be a bad deal for the shareholders. Conflicts of interest and self-dealing are not illegal if properly disclosed.
Sometimes two collaborators make each other better than either are alone. I get the sense that's how Steve Jobs and Jony Ive were. I've not seen anything Ive has done since be as good as what he did before. Someone has to hold the spike so the other one can swing the hammer. My guess is that's not how this relationship with Altman will work. And that picture is terrifying, please take it down and destroy the camera that took it.
Let 'em make overpriced tchotchkes with private capital all they want. I'm more worried about them winning inflated government contracts and tax credits paid for with public dollars.
It's a weirdly intimate pose, and it looks like it was taken from way too close— almost at arms-length, like a selfie, rather than from 8-10 feet back with a normal 80mm portrait lens. Altman especially looks kind of fish-bowled, being the one in front.
Jobs, for all his enormous character flaws, was a humanist - he believed in people and he wanted to make beautiful objects that would enhance people's lives. He was also an enormous asshole and constitutionally incapable of masking his disdain for solutions he didn't feel measured up. Ive can make a visually beautiful object, but he's shown he doesn't have the feel for the actual user, and Jobs' humanism is the half of that partnership that made it work.
Altman's got none of that (well, except the asshole part) - no vision, no taste, no concept of what a user would want, no real belief in humanity or desire to make things for humans. Ive and Altman together is going to be a disaster.
This is a fantastic comment and I couldn’t agree more. I don’t what they’re going to come up with as a result of this partnership but I expect that it will be utterly lacking in the qualities you describe. You really put your finger on it.
He most definitely did not pay $6.6B. The beauty of these OpenAI acquisitions is that they are all-stock transactions so only worth the face value in the make-believe world OpenAI investors seem to live in.
Just a guess, but I'd bet that Johnny Ive isn't exactly hurting for money. Still, the funny thing about paper money is if you have enough of it, and you're well connected (which, again, just guessing, but Johnny Ive might be) you can just borrow against it without having to make a sale or have liquid buyers. Just hope there's no margin call.
Your right it's all funny money until they are publicly traded but if they are successful it is still a ton of money. Johnny needs to feed a GulfStream - that isn't cheap;)
> Sometimes two collaborators make each other better than either are alone.
I don't disagree. Lennon + McCartney were able to fill in bridges, suggest lyrics, etc.
I've always been bothered by Ive's form-over-function though. Or perhaps it is too easy to call out a designer's very public mistakes when on the whole he has done well. For all I know it was Jobs that pushed the design choices that I dislike.
But just to iterate a couple things I dislike: the round mouse on the iMac (obv.), connectors on the back of the modern iMacs (that uncomfortable scratching sound when you're trying to find the USB slot and grate against anodized aluminum)....
You wonder, did he actually use the thing or just admire looking at it?
I don't think they got as far as making a website before being acquired. AFAICT the name of the company hadn't even been announced prior to this, it was just vaguely referred to as Jony Ive's hardware company.
That is an insane amount to hire Johnny Ive. Just to signal to the market that OpenAI is getting into hardware, what on earth could they be building towards. They’ve been writing some big checks off late, these costs will have to be justified soon enough.
> I don't know why Jony Ive is seen to be worth billions, but he's obviously not.
Agreed. If it was the only option it would have been worth it to Apple to pay him billions to _leave_. His last 5-10 years at Apple were marked by him ruining a number of products.
Broadly, you're right, but again, there is an incredible amount of inequality at the moment, so while 90% of VCs might be strapped for cash, ther other 10% have so much that they are struggling to find worthy investment vehicles that can grow their money-pile.
Its a dillema they are in because nothing can justify the volume of investment enough without a sufficiant potential for growth, so any venture that even hints at big enough return, will find itself flush with cash it wont realistically know what to do with.
I've spoken to a small handful of investors who are all saying they have capital to deploy but don't know where. One of them in particular stepped away from AI but they were seeing OTT valuations for AI startups based on what other VCs were doing.
This is a bet that's as insane as the Apple car. They're going to try to get people to buy a specialized device from a company that isn't just a software company but really a B2B API company—the only successful consumer-facing product they have ever released was an accident, a tech demo that went viral.
And what exactly is that device going to do that the iPhone (and smartphones in general) can't already do with at a minimum a few small tweaks to the existing flagships?
In the right context vertical integration can make sense, but hardware is a big stretch for OpenAI right now. They haven't even really pinned down the consumer software angle yet.
Totally insane, $6.5B acquihire. But also, all stock deal and OpenAI appears to have an unlimited number of investors waiting to give them money if/when needed.
I had been considering doing a startup in this space, I thought Humane and rabbit are directionally correct. This kinda makes me want to do it even more, that would be a fun team to compete against.
The manor criticism of them is that they are just phone apps pointlessly shoved into an extra piece of hardware. What about them do you think was directionally correct? I.e. why not just use your phone?
"phone" is over - I would just make better devices, there would be a communications device, you could call it a phone or whatever. (Frankly: I just genuinely believe I could do a really good job here is all, I have no real reason to believe that except pure ego, I'm fine admitting that)
I moved back to a flip phone (sonim xp3+) and love it as a piece of hardware. Built like a stone I could skip. Hold down a number for speed dial. Flip it closed to hang up.
I just want a competent personal assistant on speed dial I can talk to in private.
Nothing to do with AI. Phone is over because the phone is over, AI or not, young people have no interest in telephones and apple are laurels resting. https://www.skygroup.sky/article/call-declined-
Well I wasn't quite old enough to compete in big business then, and even if I was, the smart phone needed to get long enough in the tooth that alternative communication continuities became robust, that time is in and around... now.
A device with 96% market share in the developed and developing world, that is also a fashion item, that most adults spend a good chunk of their waking life staring at… is over.
I do love HN at times, I really do.
In my case smart phones never started, I did and do find the form factor aggravating for everything but phone calls and reading but they aren’t remotely over.
Over does not mean dead, the fax machine is long over, doesn't mean it's dead. The phone will take a long time to die, but it's certainly over for the phone.
Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months.
Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.
I think this is the third time I’ve seen this exact comment at the top of a HN post about an OpenAI announcement.There is a weird amount of emotional investment in not wanting OpenAI to win.
Personally, I am just excited to see what the device looks like. The prototype must be good to justify this valuation.
I think a lot of people on here have heard enough stories about how Sam Altman behaves when the cameras aren't looking and dislike him and thus his company.
Also its normal backlash - when something gets so popular so fast, you are going to naturally have some haters.
Lastly actions speak louder than words. OpenAI used to talk about AGI and Super AI and nuclear launch codes and national security. Now they are buying VS Code forks and ad companies.
The AI race is more than heating up and Sama knows it and he's throwing some hail mary's in hopes to keep OpenAI near or at the top.
Facebook is a great example of doing this and it succeeding very well. Zuck recognized that Facebook was going to zero and bought WhatsApp, Instagram, and Oculus. My guess is that sama sees the writing on the wall and knows that he must expand OpenAI in a similar way.
What happens to OpenAI competitors that can't make similar moves is another question.
Meta haven't abandoned the metaverse, and made it very clear from the beginning that "the metaverse" was something that does not exist, and will not exist in any form until the end of the decade. They continuously reiterate this during earnings calls, while increasing their capital expenditures on it.
You cannot determine it's a waste if the effort isn't completed, and if you have no insight into their progress.
Certainly the part of those investements wasted on cramming a whole PC into goggles that smash into your face with straps around your head and pretty much all of the Meta and Meta subsidized content to go along with that can be evaluated now, and not in 5 more years. The fact that Quest stalled out 2 years ago with only about 7M actives after tens of billions spent trying to make it go is pretty much all anyone needs to know about Zuck's metaverse investments. Now they're pivoting to glasses with a heads up display and pretending that was the plan all along because Zuck won't admit the cash bonfire that Quest and Horizon Worlds has been, about $100B sunk for only about $15B return with only a few million users.
Based on your comment it's apparent you neither follow the industry closely nor understand it's dynamics. The vast majority of the billions of dollars are being pumped into R&D, not marketing existing legacy devices.
You also seem to be implying in your comment that the orion glasses displayed at connect last year were a last minute pivot, which is a ludicrous statement
And I'll say again, the vast majority went into software. The Quest line can't be more than about 1/4th to 1/3rd of it and other hardware R&D is less than that. That leaves a majority to software.
Meta is a profitable business that can afford the R&D budget. I'll agree that it's a stupid way to spend $46 billion, which the average HN commentator could have told them in advance, but hey, it's their money.
Windsurf is not Instagram. Jony Ive's company is not WhatsApp. There are no meaningful network effects or lock in with these AI products.
Ive's company is going to make some forgettable, overpriced, and easily cloned wearable pendant or something equally irrelevant. Windsurf (and Cursor) will quickly fade into irrelevance as IDEs are once again commoditized by open source.
Windsurf and Cursor are money factories, that’s not a dumb play, their base will only grow significantly. OpenAI doesn’t have many money factories like google yet.
Paying for Jony doesn’t seem like desperation. Jony has no product that makes money, this is a long term aggressive hardware play. Seemingly to face off with apple.
It feels more like people just want to craft a negative narrative about OpenAI and use the data to fit that
I completely disagree. This is really just more of the great execution that I've come to expect from Sam Altman.
Core to OpenAI's strategy is that they control not just the models, but also the entrypoints to how these models are used. Don't take it from me, this is explicitly their strategy according to internal documents (https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1923799934492606921).
Some important entrypoints are:
- Entrypoints for layman consumers: They already control this entrypoint due to ChatGPT, the app. They have a limited moat here because they are at the whims of the platform owners, primarily Apple and Google. This is why they are purchasing Ive's startup.
- Entrypoints for developers: They acquired Windsurf, and are actively working on cloud development interfaces such as the new codex product.
- Entrypoints for enterprise: They have the codex products as described above, but also Operator, and are actively working on more cloud based agents.
A rebuttal that I anticipate to the above goes something along the lines of this: "If they have so much capital and dev experience, why are they acquiring these businesses instead of building internal competitors? This is a demonstration of their failure to execute"
The current AI boom is one of the most competitive tech races that has ever occurred. It is because of this, and particularly because they are so well capitalised that it makes sense to acquire instead of build. They simply cannot afford to waste time building these products internally if they can purchase products much further along in their development, and then attach them to their capital and R&D engine
While I agree the AGI thing is mostly bullshit the whole market is aware that models aren't the end-all-be-all and people will not be making huge profits out of them, all the other big players have other side businesses they can use to upsell the models, OpenAI doesn't and they need to figure something out.
That is WILD to think about because I regularly create one-pager websites for my own projects...kinda bewildering to comprehend valuations for something so basic.
I don't totally get the comparison - Palantir is a tech enabled agency making glorified dashboards that benefits from affirmative action for libertarians, and the mini Vegas orb product is Jony Ive's new dildo to capitalism to worship. Two very different things.
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 456 ms ] threadhttps://techcrunch.com/2025/04/07/openai-reportedly-mulls-bu...
> OpenAI is said to have discussed acquiring the AI hardware startup that former Apple design lead Jony Ive is building with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. According to The Information, OpenAI could pay around $500 million for the fledgling company, called io Products.
How the heck did the price go up 13x?
Too bad we can't short it or otherwise stop it, because investment for the things we could start will dry up once the world figures this out. We're all correlated to companies like FTX whether we like them or not...
Fund managers and staff have also disincentives for early exits, i.e. they have to find and invest in another company and cannot just keep the money, which means more work. They rather exit by switching stock to a hotter in demand, hard to get in companies if they can.
[1] there are always some employees and founders who would prefer some liquidity , but either they don’t hold large enough positions (employees) or investors don’t want to give a lot of liquidity (founders)
For public companies it is different- buybacks work because there is always someone ready to sell. Usually retail but also short term funds who don’t care about liquidating. ETFs and other very institutional investors or those into buffet style long term investments will not sell easily
As I write this out, it reminds me of another polarizing leader who has been really good at being in the news every day for the last 6 months, and for a 4 year period a decade ago.
If we could, then forget OpenAI. I would short every private company and end up richer than Elon Musk because 99% of the private companies fail.
“Wanting to short a private company” is such a weird comeback. Like yeah private companies most likely fail. Everyone knows.
UX will make or break any major new AI product - especially hardware. The price is steep but I think it's actually a sensible move. There really aren't that many other people with the proven ability to deliver when it comes to UX at scale for novel areas.
Ive is a very talented artist but AI is not being held back by people unwilling to courageously make things thinner and thinner.
I would imagine Ive looked at an Apple HomePod and thought “we could make this beautifully flat and hang it on the wall of every room in the house”. This might be a good idea but it in no way solves the major problems with AI/LLMs.
Jony Ive is great at UX when someone like Steve Jobs is there to veto stupid ideas.
For whoever is holding the bag at the end of it all.
Because they’re not paying with money. It’s $6.5B of pure equity in a private company that they’ve decided to value at $300B based off of… vibes or hopes or whatever?
I'm not even a hardcore AI skeptic, I think AI can be useful and valuable in the near-term (even outside coding!) and potentially transformative in the long-term but I also think current capabilities are over-hyped and wildly overvalued. I think AI is going through the typical hype cycle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle) and we're currently late in the "Inflated Expectations" phase soon to be followed by the inevitable "Trough of Disillusionment".
The center-justified serif text is new, though.
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io
and gruber is stirring up drama about why his links don't do well on hn.
I wonder how it is possible that a human watches that video and will think they don't convey pretension
The photo, the text, the video where Sam nearly looks like CGI, and then the quotes at the bottom really make for a full package of cringe.
You truly couldn't make this up, it's so beyond parody that I don't even know what to say. It's so palpably psychotic.
I felt physically sick from second-hand embarrassment watching this.
And I’ll be happy that I don’t have to explain Fremdschämen anymore. Everything has its upsides.
or Schadenfreude.
* Jony Ive has built a company with the densest collection of talent in the world
* OpenAI is spending 10 figures to buy a company from Ive
* It is not the aforementioned company with the dense collection of talent; it's instead a company that no one has heard of
Secondly, is it a weird Sora-stitchedc video? It feels like they just filmed their parts separately like they're not even talking to each other/interacting with each other. Very peculiar.
If you're going to make any sort of hardware you definitely want to tout that it was designed "with love" by "the iPod guy."
It uses the same overhype playbook from the Segway launch: "Oh, I used the [unnamed, unexplained] device and it was the most amazing thing in the whole of human history!" "This object will cause the entire planet to be redesigned around it!"
It’s cameras, speakers, microphones but no display.
I saw a presentation within the last year showcasing AR emoji-like things. Not that emojis are a killer feature, but the tech is there.
For what they are I’ll give them props for a nicely designed product, the charging case is clever and works well. I liked them for music with the Apple Watch, pretty slick combination. Maybe if I could stomach giving a llama bot access to email and calendar etc etc to have a real personal assistant it would be an attractive offering in a world that accepts being watched 24/7 by AI/billionaire overlords
I share this general point of view but take it further: I really want something in this direction (a quality AI assistant that can access my communications and continuously see and hear what I do) but it MUST be local and fully controlled by me. I feel like Meta is getting closest to offering what I'm looking for but I would never in a million years trust them with any of my data.
My wife has the first-gen raybans and they're great for taking photos and video clips of e.g. our kids' sporting events and concerts, where what it's replacing is a phone held up above the crowd getting in the way of the moment. But even with that I feel icky uploading those things to Meta's servers.
Or at least on par with all the other ones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augmented_reality
It's long past time for enhanced privacy regulation in the North American market because these products are going to be wildly invasive as people depend on them to mediate their experience with the world. I don't know what the right answer, and I am very much aware that building products like these that don't focus on monetizing user interaction and advertising would likely mean that they are priced out for lower income users, but I hope someone smarter than me can figure it out :S
This! So much this! If a product from these companies could make my life 1,000,000x better I would still be in “thanks but no thanks crowd”
If they were so obviously bad at the time, how did they get to market?
The humane launch video features two founders that look like they were forced to participate by their hostage takers
I'm not sure what "they" is here (Humane, Rabbit, or late-Ive-era Apple designs).
In all cases though there were plenty of people sounding the alarm. Both Humane and Rabbit were made fun of (wasn't in Humane's demo that the AI was completely wrong about guess the amount of almonds or the calories?). As for Apple products it was a common refrain that they were being made thin at the cost of ports/cooling/etc. How did Apple keep doubling down on the butterfly keyboard _years_ after it was well known it was a bad design?
Also, "The markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." (re: how did they get to market). You can do anything if you set enough money on fire, no matter how many people are telling you it's a bad idea.
Not sure why he deserves to be a legend, to be honest, but yes, he is a legend.
He did a good job, but those small and minimalistic designs were only possible because of the efforts of entire teams of engineers, of which the public never heard anything.
You'll note that Macbooks don't quite look the same after Ive left and his influence went away.
How are they different ?
For a while, you could get the thermals a bit more tolerable by undervolting them, but then the plundervolt mitigations blocked that.
(Typing this comment from a Lenovo X1 Extreme sitting on a cooling pad, sat next to an X1 Carbon that we can't use because it throttles too much. :)
Regarding your X1, tweaking Linux kernel parameters and downvolting a bit can work wonders in terms of reaching an pleasant heat : performance ratio. Obviously, Lenovo should have taken care of this. However, they release so many different machines that it's hard for them to pay attention to details.
I replaced the thermal paste with some of that PTM stuff which helped a bit, but not enough. I also found that for some reason it tends to BDPROCHOT-throttle when powered through the official Thunderbolt 4 Workstation Dock, even though it’s meant to be 230W and provides power separately to the USB port - but using the standalone AC adapter when docked fixes that.
Ultimately, until there are some decent X86-64 laptops released, the choice is between slow, thin and quiet vs less slow, but big, heavy and noisy. AMD is a bit better than Intel but still weak on mobile and nowhere near as good as the current Apple offerings.
On another note, why are PC manufacturers still putting fan intakes on the bottom. Maybe it’s theoretically more efficient, but tell that to my users who always do things like resting their laptop on a book then wondering why their Zoom screen sharing goes jittery.
That's not to say your situation is unique...there are probably many machines out there that have not had problems, including one owned by my wife. But there are also an unusually high number of machines that did.
"Cost"
I'm a native English speaker and nobody told me this (and I didn't manage to pick it up) until I was nearly 40. "Cost"'s past tense is also "cost."
There's another, newer, largely fatuous, verbed "cost" that means "to calculate the cost of something." That's the one that gets used in the past tense ("the projects have all been costed.")
"I've costed a keyboard replacement for my computer, and the total is more than the computer cost in the first place."
I also find it awkward and uncomfortable to use, but that might just be me.
It's like saying great architects aren't great, it's the construction workers who should get the credit.
Many forms of saying it or a very similar statement. If only these words transformed into something beneficial in the minds of flying air castle designers.
Unfortunately the progressives have been pushing the downplaying of powerful people quite hard for a long time under the guise of equality, so it’s more widespread than just HN. Even more unfortunately, equality is also one of the main ideas of communism. It’s how the government can get rid of dissenters and thus move power to itself. That’s why Marc Andreessen in the Lex Fridman podcast talked about how the government told them that they could give up their startup because it was already decided which companies would be allowed to operate. That’s not capitalism. And Marc knows it that’s why he felt he had to speak up.
But then these days lefty and righty parts of the Western English-language internet are all polarized and beating on common enemies is part of their conversational language. I think for a while HN was small enough that it resisted this polarization but at its current size there's no escaping it.
No, you made that up. It's like saying great architects are not the sole cause of the things they make.
> it's the construction workers who should get the credit
Don't you think the construction workers should get some of the credit?
IMO you still deserve credit. And in fact you still get credit. But that credit comes in the form of monetary reward and (hopefully) recognition from your team and peers, rather than in the form of fame.
All of which… seems sensible to me? Hard to imagine it working otherwise. Interestingly, the movie industry has normalized "end credits" which play after a movie ends, and which lists literally everyone involved, which is quite cool. But the effect is still the same, the people up top get 99.99% of the credit.
(Ofc the "system" is imperfect, and fame/credit can be gamed by good marketers. But it's also not a "system" that any one party invented, it's just sort of an organic economy of attention at work.)
> Hard to imagine it working otherwise.
No it isn't! It's very easy to imagine crediting people in a different ratio than we happen to do now. You are seeing what it looks like - people mythologise their heroes, and then other people come in and say "they didn't do it all, you know". People are literally doing it, in front of you, in this thread. How can it be hard to imagine?
What I'm saying is that it's not realistic. Humans are wired to remember and share highly specific things, especially names. It's been like this since the dawn of time -- the Illiad is about Achilles, not all the nameless soldiers. So this seems to be the natural order of things, rather than something designed, or something easy to change. And it makes sense, because it's practical -- our memories are limited. You can put everyone's names in the credits, but that doesn't mean they'll be remembered and shared.
Brilliant logic. And no, the original comment wasnt' saying "give the engineers some credit", it was saying the engineers deserve the credit instead of Ive.
Which is idiotic and common of smug, self-important programmers.
He got stuff wrong too, don’t get me wrong, but I have yet to see another CEO (heck any business person of note) with the same pattern of deep understanding of how those things intersected as well as he did
The Lisa, the Newton, NeXT computers, trying to dump Pixar pretty much right before they made it big right as the tech was finally catching up to their ideas.
The reality is Jobs got to roll the dice a bunch of times, and if you get to roll the dice a lot, you will have some wins. Looking only at the wins is not useful.
He wasn't always right, as I said already, but he was far better than most at this. More importantly, he was far better at most at getting others to shave their vision down to the simplest of ideas.
If you look at the competitors to Apple or NeXT during their respective eras, they were not very thoughtful in their deliberations.
It doesn't mean every idea he had was successful either, but I'm speaking specifically to the fact he intersected the three points extremely well. At a certain point, someone is good enough at something its more than luck
6.5B / 55 = $118 million per engineer
not a cheap aquihire
If similar hardware was:
- released by apple or google and deeply integrated with android/iOS
- embedded inside apple watch / pixel watch
- embedded inside slim airpods case that could be wear as pendant
- apple had siri as good as gemini and very good local STT to reduce latency
- MCP clients got more adopted by integrated in smartphones AI assistants
then it could be a hit. They lost because they shipped to early, without having big pockets for long game, without owning android OS / iOS and charged big price + subscription for this gadgets.
I think google currently is the best positioned to pull seamless experience with pixel devices (smartphone, watch, buds, gemini)
So one must infer based upon employees, monies, and other non-marketing intel.
No, we can't see it yet. And there's not much description, either. Just that it's the "coolest technology that the world will have ever seen."
Altman: "We have like magic intelligence in the cloud. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now, about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen. I would like reach down, I would get on my laptop, I'd open it up, I'd launch a web browser, I'd start typing, and I'd have to like explain that thing, and I would hit enter, and I would wait and I would get a response. And that it as the current limit of what a current laptop can do."
The above is very r/wheredidthesoda go but it hints at the product being ambient computing related.
Hard pass.
It would have to be true AGI before I’d even consider that and that’s consider.
Why do we seem determined to will the Corporate Rim into existence from the Murderbot diaries.
Altman apparently doesn't know what he's competing against. Not a good sign.
I wonder how much of this is downstream from them not being able to convert to a for profit and giving sam a slug of equity
How is Sam Altman doing so much self dealing while being an OpenAI exec?
It's probably some form of glasses with ChatGPT on it but obvious glazing, pomp and ceremony of this announcement talking directly to Apple.
Apple has 1 year to respond.
ive has a proven track record of conceptualizing and delivering category defining products. isn't that exactly the skill set that would be called for in this case? if not, what criteria would you apply?
Imagine I told you I had a top tier developer, they built this amazing system but in the last 5-10 years their ideas have not panned out and been actively harmful/misguided. Does that sound like someone you want to hire? Yes, they did amazing things in the past but recent history tells a different story.
It might be one thing if Ive left Apple and started turning out just amazing products, but that has not been the case.
This is on top of blanket legal protections that already exist in case you didn't want to do your own DD, like duty of loyalty, care and fiduciary; SEC disclosures, AD @ the DoJ, FTC, etc.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2010939117#:~:text=Alt...
Are you saying that they're saying something stupid? The vast majority of companies are regulated by non-investors; and when companies are regulated by people who are also investors, we think it is a problem rather than a requirement for the regulators to have an opinion.
I am terrified of this company making any products
Literal translation is “my snot-nosed kid / my little shit”
https://neolurk.org/wiki/%D0%9C%D0%BE%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D0%B5%D0%...
Altman's got none of that (well, except the asshole part) - no vision, no taste, no concept of what a user would want, no real belief in humanity or desire to make things for humans. Ive and Altman together is going to be a disaster.
Interesting choice of metaphor.
I don't disagree. Lennon + McCartney were able to fill in bridges, suggest lyrics, etc.
I've always been bothered by Ive's form-over-function though. Or perhaps it is too easy to call out a designer's very public mistakes when on the whole he has done well. For all I know it was Jobs that pushed the design choices that I dislike.
But just to iterate a couple things I dislike: the round mouse on the iMac (obv.), connectors on the back of the modern iMacs (that uncomfortable scratching sound when you're trying to find the USB slot and grate against anodized aluminum)....
You wonder, did he actually use the thing or just admire looking at it?
I'm having trouble finding their website.
"About 55 hardware engineers, software developers, and manufacturing experts will join OpenAI as part of the acquisition". (for $6.5B)
So I think WhatsApp still holds the record for engineer/$B acquisition:
"WhatsApp had 32 engineers when it was bought for 19 billion dollars."
Even more if you correct for inflation.
Or Jony to like the $6.5B headline, but realize that he is probably only getting $150M.
This is on the back of epic wealth inequality.
I don't know why Jony Ive is seen to be worth billions, but he's obviously not, he's just another shill in the ivory tower.
Agreed. If it was the only option it would have been worth it to Apple to pay him billions to _leave_. His last 5-10 years at Apple were marked by him ruining a number of products.
And what exactly is that device going to do that the iPhone (and smartphones in general) can't already do with at a minimum a few small tweaks to the existing flagships?
In the right context vertical integration can make sense, but hardware is a big stretch for OpenAI right now. They haven't even really pinned down the consumer software angle yet.
10 mins I spent watching that weird video in third person dialogue no less, they better deliver something great.
It's 6.5 billion in monopoly money. OpenAI has an insane valuation right now, and they're using it to buy stuff with it, as they should.
I just want a competent personal assistant on speed dial I can talk to in private.
Its been over for almost 2 decades so not sure what the point of calling that out is.
I do love HN at times, I really do.
In my case smart phones never started, I did and do find the form factor aggravating for everything but phone calls and reading but they aren’t remotely over.
Guess the Earth is over because in a few billion years the Sun will expand.
https://www.google.com/search?q=technology+adoption+curve https://ca.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/what-...
If you’d have said saturated I may have agreed but the adoption curve flattens because everyone who will adopt it has adopted it.
By that (and your apparent) definition of over, houses are over, microwaves are over, cookers are over, electricity is over…
honestly that sounds ripe for disruption
When cars came along the horse was over but the carriage bit is still going strong!
Billions will be spent to realize that screens are useful.
Altman is desperately trying to use OpenAI's inflated valuation to buy some kind of advantage. Which is why he's buying ads, paying $6.5 billion in stock to Jony Ive, and $3 billion for a VSCode fork created in a few months.
Almost anything makes sense when you see your valuation going to zero unless you can figure something out.
“This is a sign of OpenAI’s weakness”
I think this is the third time I’ve seen this exact comment at the top of a HN post about an OpenAI announcement.There is a weird amount of emotional investment in not wanting OpenAI to win.
Personally, I am just excited to see what the device looks like. The prototype must be good to justify this valuation.
Also its normal backlash - when something gets so popular so fast, you are going to naturally have some haters.
Lastly actions speak louder than words. OpenAI used to talk about AGI and Super AI and nuclear launch codes and national security. Now they are buying VS Code forks and ad companies.
The AI race is more than heating up and Sama knows it and he's throwing some hail mary's in hopes to keep OpenAI near or at the top.
What happens to OpenAI competitors that can't make similar moves is another question.
You cannot determine it's a waste if the effort isn't completed, and if you have no insight into their progress.
You also seem to be implying in your comment that the orion glasses displayed at connect last year were a last minute pivot, which is a ludicrous statement
Ive's company is going to make some forgettable, overpriced, and easily cloned wearable pendant or something equally irrelevant. Windsurf (and Cursor) will quickly fade into irrelevance as IDEs are once again commoditized by open source.
Paying for Jony doesn’t seem like desperation. Jony has no product that makes money, this is a long term aggressive hardware play. Seemingly to face off with apple.
It feels more like people just want to craft a negative narrative about OpenAI and use the data to fit that
Core to OpenAI's strategy is that they control not just the models, but also the entrypoints to how these models are used. Don't take it from me, this is explicitly their strategy according to internal documents (https://x.com/TechEmails/status/1923799934492606921).
Some important entrypoints are:
- Entrypoints for layman consumers: They already control this entrypoint due to ChatGPT, the app. They have a limited moat here because they are at the whims of the platform owners, primarily Apple and Google. This is why they are purchasing Ive's startup.
- Entrypoints for developers: They acquired Windsurf, and are actively working on cloud development interfaces such as the new codex product.
- Entrypoints for enterprise: They have the codex products as described above, but also Operator, and are actively working on more cloud based agents.
A rebuttal that I anticipate to the above goes something along the lines of this: "If they have so much capital and dev experience, why are they acquiring these businesses instead of building internal competitors? This is a demonstration of their failure to execute"
The current AI boom is one of the most competitive tech races that has ever occurred. It is because of this, and particularly because they are so well capitalised that it makes sense to acquire instead of build. They simply cannot afford to waste time building these products internally if they can purchase products much further along in their development, and then attach them to their capital and R&D engine
Which, when you think about it, is really kind of sad. They would have been so much better off as a non-profit.
[1] https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1925235156157440438
Aside from the news is there anything more to this acquisition than two people effectivly repeating "look at us" on loop?