Sam Altman and Jony Ive Will Force A.I. Into Your Life

Ive led the designs of the original iMac, the iPad, and the Apple Watch, among other era-defining products. Then, in 2019, he left Apple to start his own design firm called LoveFrom. The news of his move to OpenAI felt something like learning that LeBron James was joining the Miami Heat: Ive had become synonymous with Apple's success, perhaps second only to Jobs. Now, after a period of independence, he was choosing a new team. The announcement of the deal with OpenAI--for a reported 6.5 billion in OpenAI equity--came via a press release, featuring a rather cuddly portrait of Ive with OpenAI's C.E.O. and co-founder, Sam Altman (shot by the British fashion photographer Craig McDean) and a faux-casual videotaped interview session between the two at San Francisco's Cafe Zoetrope. In it, Altman describes "a family of devices that would let people use A.I. to create all sorts of wonderful things," enabled by "magic intelligence in the cloud."