Tripp Mickle Profiles Jony Ive and LoveFrom, Confirms OpenAI Partnership for Device

Tripp Mickle, writing for The New York Times:

Mr. Ive and Mr. Altman met for dinner several more times before agreeing to build a product, with LoveFrom leading the design. They have raised money privately, with Mr. Ive and Emerson Collective, Ms. Powell Jobs’s company, contributing, and could raise up to $1 billion in start-up funding by the end of the year from tech investors.

In February, Mr. Ive found office space for the company. They spent $60 million on a 32,000-square-foot building called the Little Fox Theater that backs up to the LoveFrom courtyard. He has hired about 10 employees, including Tang Tan, who oversaw iPhone product development, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Mr. Ive in leading design at Apple.

On a Friday morning in late June, Mr. Tan and Ms. Hankey could be seen wheeling chairs between the Little Fox Theater and the nearby LoveFrom studio. The chairs were topped by papers and cardboard boxes with the earliest ideas for a product that uses A.I. to create a computing experience that is less socially disruptive than the iPhone.

The project is being developed in secret. Mr. Newson said that what the product would be and when it would be released were still being determined.

I feel like Mickle somewhat buried the lede here. Architectural projects, magnetic buttons, for $2,000 jackets a lovely new typeface, new steering wheels for electric Ferrari sports cars — all of those design projects are interesting. But an OpenAI-powered personal electronic device, with longtime Apple all-stars Evans Hankey and Tang Tan leading the small team? That’s interesting. That’s competing against Apple. That’s complicated given Ive’s legendary history with Apple. It’s further complicated by the fact that most of LoveFrom’s designers came with Ive from Apple. It’s complicated even further by Powell Jobs’s backing of the startup.

Also somewhat interesting to me is the timing of Mickle’s profile. He spoke with Ive and Marc Newson back in June, but the story was published ... the very day after the arrival of Apple’s new iPhones, AirPods, and watches. That timing might have been entirely the choice of the Times. But still, it’s hard not to notice.

And the whole thing is made even stranger given OpenAI’s partnership with Apple to provide “world knowledge” generative AI by the end of this year. Can’t help but think of then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt being an Apple board member when the iPhone debuted — with built-in system apps for Google Maps and YouTube — while Google was simultaneously building Android to compete.

★ Monday, 23 September 2024