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

Last Wednesday, OpenAI announced that it was acquiring a company called io, an artificial-intelligence-forward product-development firm co-founded, last year, by Jony Ive, the vastly influential designer known for his work with Steve Jobs at Apple. 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.” The symbolism of the partnership was clear: Altman is the new Jobs, and together he and Ive promise to create the next ur-device, a personal technology that will reshape our lives just as the iPhone did. Once it’s ready, they say, they’ll ship a hundred million devices “faster than any company” ever has.

We don’t know what it will look like just yet, but Altman swears that it will be “​​the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.” Ming-chi Kuo, a respected analyst of Apple’s Chinese manufacturing, posted on X that the product is planned to be “as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle” and that it will have “cameras and microphones for environmental detection.” It might resemble other early A.I. devices announced or launched in the past year, such as Friend, another pendant-like chatbot companion; Humane, an A.I. pin with a laser projector; or Rabbit, a small handheld gadget. Yet the functionality of these nascent inventions is severely limited. “Vaporware” is a term of art from the nineteen-eighties that was popularized in the early internet era, referring to new software or technology that overpromises and underdelivers—if the product is even released in the first place. However many breathless headlines about OpenAI’s acquisition, it’s just vaporware until Altman and Ive prove otherwise. Hype, after all, is one of OpenAI’s primary achievements—despite predictions about ChatGPT changing the world, the company is losing billions of dollars a year.

What we can do, in the meantime, is imagine what an iPhone of A.I. might look like based on the A.I. technology that so far exists. Generative A.I. has already been integrated into many of our daily digital experiences, whether we want it there or not. iPhones now summarize text threads using A.I. and allow users to generate custom emojis. Google recently announced an “AI Mode” that it intends to supplant its traditional search box with, a development that threatens to slow open-web traffic down to a trickle. Meta’s “AI Glasses,” a collaboration with Ray-Ban, integrate voice chatting and live translation with the company’s A.I. assistant. And chatbots with distinct personalities, like Replika and Character.ai, are becoming increasingly popular as they get better at mimicking human connection. Perhaps Altman and Ive’s machine will mingle all of these functionalities: it might listen to and interpret the sounds around you; it might respond with predictive text, delivered to you instantaneously and in a customizable tone; and it might become your main avenue for accessing information, like a personal concierge. It will reportedly not attempt to supplant the other technologies you depend on: according to the Wall Street Journal, Altman described it as a kind of third device, meant to work within an ecosystem that includes your laptop and smartphone. But it will effectively be a self-surveillance machine that creates a technological scrim for your personal reality. The involvement of Ive invites inevitable comparisons with the iPhone, but this is not necessarily a compliment; to many of us, an iPhone of A.I. sounds less like a utopian promise than like a threat that A.I. will soon become ubiquitous and unavoidable. Smartphones have already absorbed us in our screens, creating personalized information bubbles; omnipresent A.I. will only intensify that atomization while being more automated, more inscrutable, and more inescapable.

The video claims that more information about the new product will be shared next year, which would mean that we’re currently in the Palm Pilot stage of A.I.—with the iPhone-like invention looming around the corner, poised to obliterate the competition. But there are vast logistical hurdles to achieving this optimistic timeline for ubiquitous consumer A.I. More than a billion people in the world own iPhones. Some research estimates that generating a typical e-mail using A.I. consumes a bottle’s worth of water to siphon heat away from the data centers’ servers to separate cooling towers. This means that, if we all started using our personal A.I. machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll of our personal technology would skyrocket—imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck. This, in turn, would warp the direction of global economies, requiring the construction of ever-larger data centers. The economic and environmental overhaul would be done in the name of outsourcing our human thoughts and memories to an omnipresent machine resting in our pockets or hanging around our necks.

Altman and Ive are positioning their device as a solution to screen fatigue. They promise that their gadget will free us from technology, as evinced by their softly smiling faces in their joint portrait and the warmth and companionship of the café in which they conducted their video interview. But we will only get to this appealingly humane place, they imply, by adopting more technology—their technology. Speculative mockups online imagine an A.I. companion device that looks simple, like a rounded metal amulet—it would be Ive’s style to make the design approachable yet austere. Yet the sleek and frictionless object will rely on a vast infrastructure of factories and server farms; the labor of human maintenance workers and moderators; and, ultimately, the corpus of information that has been digested as training data, which is effectively the entire history of human thought. The little pendants around our necks will be a hundred million Trojan horses, smuggling A.I. into every aspect of our lives. The comforting tone of Altman and Ive’s pitch belies the enormous uncertainty of what their plan would unleash. A recent study in the United Kingdom found that forty-six per cent of youth ages sixteen to twenty-one would prefer to live in a world in which the internet doesn’t exist. Given all the regret and dread that digital culture has prompted, some two decades since the advent of social media, it seems worth thinking twice before allowing Altman and Ive’s incipient creation to occupy our time and our minds, too. ♦