A few months ago, there were reports that Sam Altman would collaborate with legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to start their own AI hardware project for AI devices. Now, it is reported that this initiative has further progressed, and these two senior figures have approached Tang Tan, a departing Apple executive and Vice President of iPhone and Watch design, to join the project. According to reports, Tan will join LoveFrom, the company founded by Ive in 2019, which is a design studio for creating AI devices. Tan will lead the hardware engineering project as he has already left his current position at Apple. Insiders familiar with the matter have stated that his role at Apple has been assigned to someone else, and he will leave in February. With Tan's departure, there have been significant changes in Apple's design team, further exacerbating the talent drain within the company. Since 2019, approximately 14 members of Ive's original team have left, leaving only about six designers who previously worked under Ive still at Apple. Meanwhile, SoftBank CEO and investor Masayoshi Son has also become involved in this new development and has had discussions with Altman and Ive about this idea, although it is currently unclear whether Son will be involved in the long term.

The Significance of OpenAI

LoveFrom has successfully gathered a group of well-known clients, including brands such as Airbnb, Ferrari NV, and Moncler SpA. Additionally, the company has a three-year consulting contract with Apple, which will end in 2022. It is worth noting that there are now over 20 former Apple employees who are part of the LoveFrom team. Although it is currently unclear what specific form of product LoveFrom is developing, speculation suggests it could be a home device similar to Alexa Mini or something akin to Humane Ai. The combination of OpenAI's technology and Ive's hardware design capabilities is bound to create some successful products.

Competition between OpenAI and Apple

Investing in other startups was one of the reasons that led to dissatisfaction among OpenAI board members and ultimately resulted in Altman's dismissal. Although he has now returned as CEO, Altman hopes that people will be able to better utilize the company's technology across different product forms. In 2020, Altman also invested $30 million in Humane's Series A funding, and the company announced the launch of Ai Pin powered by GPT. An interesting fact about Humane is that it was founded by former Apple employees Imran Chaudhari and Bethany Bongiorno. Imran worked at Apple for over 20 years and was involved in the development of products such as iPod, iPad, Apple Watch, and iPhone. Before the announcement of Humane Ai Pin, Meta's Ray-Ban glasses seemed like a magical future technology that everyone would wear to record the world around them. But now, investing in a pair of glasses seems completely outdated, and OpenAI knows this. Humane is not the only thing. OpenAI recently partnered with WHOOP to launch WHOOP Coach, indicating that SoftBank may soon become part of OpenAI's efforts. Leveraging OpenAI's latest technology, WHOOP Coach can generate personalized and conversational answers in real-time to address your inquiries about health, fitness, and well-being. OpenAI's upgrades to visual and audio capabilities for GPT-4 all point to the fact that embedding this technology into hardware devices makes sense.

What about Apple?

While Altman's plan is being implemented, Apple is also following the path of OpenAI and increasingly focusing on building generative AI capabilities for its hardware. Recently, Apple has also engaged with news publications such as Conde Nast, NBC News, and IAC to help them build Apple's generative AI capabilities in a multi-year agreement worth at least $50 million. The company has also been releasing open-source projects for AI work on its silicon chips, including multimodal large language models (LLM) like Ferret. It is evident that OpenAI is ready to embrace the challenge of AI hardware, while Apple is ready to utilize its generative AI capabilities in software. It now appears that OpenAI and Altman, along with their teams at Humane, LoveFrom, and all the newly joined Apple employees, have gained an advantage over their competitors.