This is a sign of OpenAI's weakness.

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.

Agreed. This doesn't look like 4D chess, this stinks of desperation.

AGI any day now, though! Any day now.

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.

VCs have too much capital at hand and don't know how to deploy it all.

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.

> 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.

As someone with first hand knowledge about this project, I find it insane that IO a company with no product and no history is valued and bought at $6.5B. They don't even have a prototype or any idea about how to make it work, yet they are already valued at the price of a successful startup. I think their product will be as popular as humane's AI pin. This is just to project progress and attract more funding.

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.

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).

Where is they AR/VR part in the Ray Bans?

It’s cameras, speakers, microphones but no display.

I’m pretty sure the latest models have AR.

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.

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

I actually thought the video they posted[1] would have information, but that was just 9 minutes of two guys congratulating each other.

[1] https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1925235156157440438

These product-focused moves feel like a tacit admission that AGI is further away than they’ve been preaching.

If it was close at hand, spending precious resources on anything other than pursuing AGI wouldn’t make sense.

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.

Everything about this announcement screams “we’re completely out of touch”

I am terrified of this company making any products

What is it about that picture that's so icky? I had the exact same reaction.

OpenAI announcement: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

Is this an m&a press release or an engagement announcement

The hyperminimal white-text-on-black-background is more of an Apple-ism from their corporate announcements back during the Jobs/Ive days.

The center-justified serif text is new, though.

The picture alone is enough to make you vomit

Yeah, that is a really weird photo. Trying hard to replicate the iconic Steve Jobs photo I guess.

That and that every paragraph of text on the page is centre-aligned. What is this, Geocities?

There's a video at the bottom "two friends"

All of the glazing and self-dealing here is disgusting. This is so clearly a grift, with the price of the company being several magnitudes higher than it was ever valued before. Allowing Sam and company to receive billions of their own investor's money.

This is a horrible precendence to set and will continue the trend of american companies where founders will lie, cheat, and steal, all in service of getting their own bag.

I hope Windsurf and Jony got some real money along with their OpenAI stock.

From April:

https://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?

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, 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...

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.

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.

The same guy who designed the 2016 generation MacBooks and was kicked out of Apple over it?

Jony Ive is great at UX when someone like Steve Jobs is there to veto stupid ideas.

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.

Only in silicon valley would $6,500,000,000 for a single designer seem like a sensible move...

It's not actually $6.5 billion cash. It's a stock certificate. A stock certificate which can go to zero.

Perhaps this is a way to channel money into someone's pocket, instead of keeping it in a non-profit?

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?

You’d win

That was both a very very kind and very very mean thing to say. :)

People seem to be overlooking this: “ Altman doesn’t have equity in io, OpenAI said. “

What about equity-like-instruments-that-don’t-have-the-word-equity-in-the-name?

Or stakes in other companies that company then buys

Is there actually a thing or product here they're talking about / they made / making?

interesting back door way to get sam altman some equity in openAI.

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

Seems that OpenAI is acquiring Io for $6.4B in an all-equity deal.

The most expensive aquihire in history

How would high net worth people like Jony Ive pay tax on this sort of big windfalls? Especially if it's all stock.

The name is "IO". A day after the Google I/O keynote. Another purposely planned derailment.

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.

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.

Apple should buy Anthropic I think. It’s the last available lab.

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.

Not sure what you are replying to. I'm not investing in OpenAI nor do I want to. I can call out BS behavior without being an investor.

Or being CEO of a company and then using as vendors for your employee benefits companies that you've invested in. Blatant unethical self-dealing.

The self dealing king Sam Altman strikes again

He is second only to Elon in this case (SolarCity, X/XAI).

That's why they so despise each-other; they're the same

No - Elon is much more successful

edit: i was wrong about their website.

That is absolutely not their website

Thanks. Could you share the link?

I'm having trouble finding their website.

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.