Reports about a year ago said that former Apple design guru Jony Ive was working to create the “iPhone of artificial intelligence” in partnership with OpenAI. This would become the first first-party ChatGPT device, with the startup rumored to be looking for around $1 billion in funding to start this endeavor.
Months later, we learned that Jony Ive had hired another former iPhone designer who had just departed Apple, Tang Tan. I saw it at the time as another hint that a ChatGPT device was indeed in the works.
None of the parties involved confirmed any of these rumors in the year since those initial reports.
Fast-forward to mid-September, and Jony Ive says the project is real. His company, LoveFrom, will be involved with designing this mysterious new iPhone competitor. More interestingly, Laurene Powell Jobs’s Emerson Collective is funding the startup in addition to Ive himself. The project is seeking $1 billion in funding by the end of the year.
Those reports last year almost always featured three names involved in the ChatGPT hardware project. Jony Ive and Sam Altman are the obvious first two. The third was Masayoshi Son, the CEO of Softbank, who was reportedly ready to invest $1 billion. The New York Times’ profile of Ive makes no mention of Son, however. But this profile in The Times gives us the first confirmation that Jony Ive and LoveFrom are involved in the ChatGPT hardware project.
Ive apparently met Altman through the CEO of Airbnb, Brian Chesky. But details about the actual product have not been revealed. LoveFrom cofounder Marc Newson said the AI product and launch timeframe have not been decided.
There’s no question that the ChatGPT device will compete against the iPhone, which is an AI product now that Apple created Apple Intelligence. It’ll also compete against Google’s Pixel phones. The Pixel 9 is Google’s main AI hardware product. But that doesn’t necessarily mean the ChatGPT product will look like a smartphone.
Reports say that OpenAI is also raising a new investment round at a valuation of $100 billion. Apple might be one of the interested parties that will invest in the startup. If that happens, Apple will be investing in a product that will ultimately compete against its most important product.
While the report doesn’t share any details about the ChatGPT gadget, it says that the product “uses AI to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.”
I’ll point out that other companies have already tried to come up with AI-first hardware. The Humane Ai Pin, made by former Apple employees, was a massive failure. The Rabbit r1 turned out to be a phone-like device running Android, though its creators never made that clear at launch.
However, these attempts at creating an AI device did not benefit from having this particular team of renowned designers. Jony Ive’s involvement is the most important one, of course.
The new startup, whose name is also unknown, has ten employees at the time of this writing. Tang Tan and Evans Hankey joined Ive and Newson. Both of them worked with Ive on the iPhone while they were at Apple.
LoveFrom will design the ChatGPT hardware. The company is working out of a 32,000-square-foot office building in San Francisco. According to The Verge, it’s part of a $90 million strip of real estate that Ive bought.
Since The Times says the new startup is looking to secure $1 billion in funding by year’s end, we’ll likely learn more details about this first ChatGPT hardware product soon. That’s probably why Ive has confirmed the project, since it would have inevitably leaked.
