OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

[nickthegreek]

https://archive.is/HgpSJ

[Bjorkbat]

A while back someone here on Hacker News made a pretty insightful comment that as great of a designer as Jony Ive is, a large part of his success is owed to the fact that he had an "editor" in the form of Steve Jobs. Once Jobs passed, he no longer really had an editor.

It remains to be seen whether Sam Altman / OpenAI in general will be a good editor

[quitit]

This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation.

I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function.

More realistically Apple's design is good because they take the iterative approach seriously.

[gist]

Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman)

I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for the purchase).

[herval]

that's the elusive trick of "leadership" that's so hard to measure - great leaders turn talented (and even not really talented) people into success stories. Bad "leaders" can manage the most talented team of the planet into the ground.

[bsimpson]

It's been <20y since YouTube was acquired for $1B, which felt like an imaginary valuation at the time, but it was for a company that actually had traction with users.

Inflation-adjusted, this acquisition is worth 4x that for… vibes from a guy who led a famous team a long time ago?

[dr_dshiv]

Just need a way to talk to ChatGPT anytime. Microphone, speaker and permanent connection to ChatGPT. That’s all you need: io

One need is being able to talk to ChatGPT in a whisper or silent voice… so you can do it in public. I don’t think that comes from them, but it will be big when it does. Much easier than brain implants! In an ear device, you need enough data of listening to the muscles and the sounds together, then you can just listen to the muscles…

I assume they want to have their own OS that is, essentially, their models in the cloud.

so, here are my specific predictions

1. Subvocalization-sensing earbuds that detect "silent speech" through jaw/ear canal muscle movements (silently talk to AI anytime)

2. An AI OS laptop — the model is the interface

3. A minimal pocket device where most AI OS happens in the cloud

4. an energy efficient chip that runs powerful local AI, to put in any physical object

5. … like a clip. Something that attaches to clothes.

6. a perfect flat glass tablet like in the movies (I hope not)

7. ambient intelligent awareness through household objects with microphones, sensors, speakers, screens —

[anonzzzies]

So does openai know how to widen the context window without it taking more money? Otherwise Google wins, again. And this is all boring. Gemini 2.5 pro preview where you can just insert all files you have and actually it doesn't compress and has it in memory is just what you want. All the compression tricks etc really are shit compared. 32k input tokens is a joke now once you tried this.

As in bearish on openai if they don't offer cheaper 10m context soonish. Google will.

[elAhmo]

Buying a company without a product (or anything announced), without a website, with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.

I am sure this aligns with the non-profit part of OpenAI whose board allegedly has influence of where the company is heading.

This industry is amazing.

[firtoz]

> with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either.

What do you mean?

> Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI

[mk_stjames]

From the same people that brought you "Vibe Coding", comes "Vibe Acquisitions".

[xgolwks]

What the other commenters are forgetting is that this is the same Sam Altman who planned and executed the extraction of Reddit from Condé Nast.

This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.

How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.

[ants_everywhere]

I have a feeling OpenAI will eventually be looked back on as the company that forced Google to release its internal AI product and then died a slow death.

[KolibriFly]

But can they transition from being "the lab that shocked the world" to a sustainable product company in a hyper-competitive space?

[dudus]

First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.

[Jackson__]

They've already claimed that there will be no "GPT-5" LLM, and that instead what they want to call "GPT-5" is a fusion of their various models like 4o, dalle, their video model, etc. That in and of itself is a move that makes it quite clear to me they've hit a wall on the intelligence side.

Add these purchases, and it seems like they are extremely desperate.

[gnopgnip]

From the article 5 billion of the payment is equity in OpenAI. So they aren't spending cash

[no_wizard]

I have a gut feeling alot of this is going to go negative for OpenAI. I simply don't see what they're going to produce in a reasonable amount of time that justifies hardware, for example.

I'm open to being wrong, very open, but I need to see evidence. Hard evidence.

[mlnj]

What else are they going to do with all that money?

Raise billions and billions under the guise of AGI coming tomorrow and they just become a too big to fail company gobbling up any competition.

You don't hear anyone touting AGI anymore do we?

[rcarmo]

Well, Windsurf is no longer worth what they paid for it. Let's see how the rest goes.

[RC_ITR]

Just to stem pointless debates before they flame up - both these acquisitions appear to be primarily if not exclusively for stock.

Sure, if you want to get into theoretical finance, OpenAI could have sold these new shares for cash, so technically there's no difference, but OpenAI is only spending opportunity cost cash, rather than fiat.

OpenAI's fiat likely still goes to the things you'd expect, like training models and paying for inference.

[magicink81]

One explanation:

The models will not be a moat, but the products can be. More specifically "sticky" products / killer apps like ChatGPT, and whatever forthcoming products this acquisition of Jony Ive's company may lead to.

Windsurf acquisition may be explained in part by the same logic of owning a strong and sticky product, as well as a good source of data for training.

[killerstorm]

It doesn't look like they're cash-strapped, more like they want to raise stakes.

To play in the same league as Google and Microsoft you have to be big. So they need to increase enterprise value to be taken seriously.

That's what investors expect them to do.

The only other option is to close it down, as OpenAI would quickly become obsolete if they can no longer produce frontier models.

As for the moat, it's not something you can just conjure, right? Perhaps the whole point of these acquisition is to create a moat, but only time will tell if that worked.

[zombiwoof]

Clearly foundation models don’t make money or a viable business on their own

[eviks]

In what way can the be too big to fail? Who will be forced to bail them out and why?

[fakedang]

Don't forget their Abilene chip factory.

[butifnot0701]

Wasnt this all stock deal tho?

[sagarkamat]

Meh, all stock deal. They are not spending any raised cash on this.

[apples_oranges]

And nobody on this forum uses his brain to find out what’s going on ..

[yahoozoo]

> At io, the group set out to develop, engineer and manufacturer a collection of products for an era of artificial general intelligence — the point when technology achieves humanlike cognitive abilities.

And everyone cringed.

[yalogin]

This is the only play for OpenAI. The AI service is going to be commoditized very very quickly and their moat will be gone. They will be doing vertical integration and push into everything. If people complained apple and google looked at apps and copied the functionality themselves what OpenAI will do will be much worse. Also when it took apple and google years to do it, OpenAI will do it very very quickly, in a year most

[samtp]

> In the interview, Altman said Jobs would be “damn proud” of Ive’s latest move.

What an extremely weird (and egotistical) thing to say if you're in Altman's position

[brador]

It’s a trophy acqui-hire. Something to brag about over dinner and to investors.

[mrbungie]

Narcissistic ego stroking. He literally is invoking and thinking out loud for a dead man, who was not that intimate with him, just to validate his own ventures and acquihires. Very weird.

It wouldn't be that weird if Ive had said so himself.

[nashashmi]

… Unless he engineered the entire deal himself and wanted to make it seem like it was Ive’s greatest maneuver.

[inerte]

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And Ive and Sama were the sixth day.

[DevKoala]

While Sam is being egotistic, the reverence of Jobs to the point nobody is even allowed to assume how he would have thought is also weird imho.

[incoming1211]

Jony Ive is a nobody without Steve Jobs.

After Jobs passed he never produced anything of any value, he almost destroyed Macbooks.

[vjvjvjvjghv]

It’s mind boggling how much money is floating around once you are part of the insider circle. What has that company been doing to be worth 6.5 billion?

[Snuggly73]

I am utterly confused. If AGI is around the corner, this means that the economy is going to be destroyed and money are going to lose their meaning. Who is going to buy your AI gadget? Why spend money on that and Windsurf?

[0xB31B1B]

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

[woah]

How does that work?

[ko_pivot]

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.

[minimaxir]

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?

[TeeWEE]

Wow Sam Altman is so full of himself... I would never want to work for this narcist. Just watch this video. https://x.com/sama/status/1925242282523103408

[joshstrange]

I thought this was going to be some hit-piece tweet then I saw it was a tweet from Sam Altman himself. That video... Wow. I got in 2min before I had to stop. I thought you might be over-exaggerated but full of /themselves/ doesn't even begin to describe it.

Ship something, then you can create a video like that, not before.

[jes5199]

this is designed to appeal directly to a certain kind of self-mythologizing Bay Area techie, the kind that was common in the early 2010s. It’s meant to signal continuity, “we’re just like you, we loved Steve Jobs”

apparently it worked on some people: https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io

[mehh]

I tried but it was too much, first I thought it was a spoof, then perhaps AI generated and then couldn't watch no more!

[basisword]

I agree the first minute or two of this was very cringe. I stuck with it though and it reminded me very much of the kind of talk that was common in the late '00s tech scene. Sort of nice to see that kind of optimism again.