Latest news with #AIhardware
The Verge
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Verge
OpenAI closes its deal to buy Jony Ive's io and build AI hardware
OpenAI has officially closed its nearly $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famed former Apple designer Jony Ive, the company announced Wednesday. But it was careful to only refer to the startup as io Products Inc. The blog post initially announcing the acquisition was also scrubbed from OpenAI's website due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google's moonshot factory. Now it's back up, with a new note: 'We're thrilled to share that the io Products, Inc. team has officially merged with OpenAI. Jony Ive and LoveFrom remain independent and have assumed deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI.' OpenAI originally announced the deal and plans to create dedicated AI hardware, with a video on social media featuring its CEO, Sam Altman, and Ive. That video has been scrubbed from its website and social media channels due to the lawsuit and has not returned. 'The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco,' the blog post states.
The Verge
09-07-2025
- Business
- The Verge
OpenAI closes deal with Jony Ive's io.
Posted Jul 9, 2025 at 5:12 PM UTC OpenAI closes deal with Jony Ive's io. OpenAI has officially closed its nearly $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, the company announced Wednesday. But it was careful to only refer to the startup as io Products Inc. OpenAI originally announced the deal, and its plans to create dedicated AI hardware, with a viral video featuring its CEO Sam Altman and Ive. The video has since been scrubbed from its website and social media channels due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google's moonshot factory. The blog post initially announcing the acquisition was also scrubbed from OpenAI's website due to the lawsuit, but it's now back up. 'The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco,' the blog post states.
The Verge
22-06-2025
- Business
- The Verge
OpenAI and Jony Ive's ‘io' brand has vanished, but their AI hardware deal remains
OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI's nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware. OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google's moonshot factory. The announcement blog post and a nine-minute video featuring Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman are no longer available. The blog post from Ive and Altman announcing the deal said, 'The io team, focused on developing products that inspire, empower and enable, will now merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering and product teams in San Francisco.' OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood: This page is temporarily down due to a court order following a trademark complaint from iyO about our use of the name 'io.' We don't agree with the complaint and are reviewing our options.
Bloomberg
28-05-2025
- Business
- Bloomberg
Consumer AI Gadgets Will Come With a Whimper, Not a Bang
Where are all the artificial intelligence consumer gadgets? Even a year ago, it seemed tech companies were working to incorporate the technology into every physical device, from coffee makers to vacuums, making 'AI-powered' hardware seem like it would soon be as ubiquitous as 'battery-powered' electronics. Typically, tech conferences offer a glimmer of these futuristic toys. Not all of them end up hitting the market, but it's where we can dream a little about new pocket devices or household robots taking on a greater role in our lives.
Fast Company
23-05-2025
- Business
- Fast Company
Sorry, Google and OpenAI: The future of AI hardware remains murky
2026 may still be more than seven months away, but it's already shaping up as the year of consumer AI hardware. Or at least the year of a flurry of high-stakes attempts to put generative AI at the heart of new kinds of devices—several of which were in the news this week. Let's review. On Tuesday, at its I/O developer conference keynote, Google demonstrated smart glasses powered by its Android XR platform and announced that eyewear makers Warby Parker and Gentle Monster would be selling products based on it. The next day, OpenAI unveiled its $6.5 billion acquisition of Jony Ive's startup IO, which will put the Apple design legend at the center of the ChatGPT maker's quest to build devices around its AI. And on Thursday, Bloomberg 's Mark Gurman reported that Apple hopes to release its own Siri-enhanced smart glasses. In theory, all these players may have products on the market by the end of next year. What I didn't get from these developments was any new degree of confidence that anyone has figured out how to produce AI gadgets that vast numbers of real people will find indispensable. When and how that could happen remains murky—in certain respects, more than ever. To be fair, none of this week's news involved products that are ready to be judged in full. Only Google has something ready to demonstrate in public at all: Here's Janko Roettgers's report on his I/O experience with prototype Android XR glasses built by Samsung. That the company has already made a fair amount of progress is only fitting given that Android XR scratches the same itch the company has had since it unveiled its ill-fated Google Glass a dozen years ago. It's just that the available technologies—including Google's Gemini LLM—have come a long, long way. Unlike the weird, downright alien-looking Glass, Google's Android XR prototype resembles a slightly chunky pair of conventional glasses. It uses a conversational voice interface and a transparent mini-display that floats on your view of your surroundings. Google says that shipping products will have 'all-day' battery life, a claim, vague though it is, that Glass could never make. But some of the usage scenarios that the company is showing off, such as real-time translation and mapping directions, are the same ones it once envisioned Glass enabling. The market's rejection of Glass was so resounding that one of the few things people remember about the product is that its fans were seen as creepy, privacy-invading glassholes. Enough has happened since then—including the success of Meta's smart Ray-Bans —that Android XR eyewear surely has a far better shot at acceptance. But as demoed at I/O, the floating screen came off as a roadblock between the user and the real world. Worst case, it might simply be a new, frictionless form of screen addiction that further distracts us from human contact. Meanwhile, the video announcement of OpenAI and IO's merger was as polished as a Jony Ive-designed product—San Francisco has rarely looked so invitingly lustrous—but didn't even try to offer details about their work in progress. Altman and Ive smothered each other in praise and talked about reinventing computing. Absent any specifics, Altman's assessment of one of Ive's prototypes ('The coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen') sounded like runaway enthusiasm at best and Barnumesque puffery at worst. Reporting on an OpenAI staff meeting regarding the news, The Wall Street Journal 's Berber Jin provided some additional tidbits about the OpenAI device. Mostly, they involved what it isn't—such as a phone or glasses. It might not even be a wearable, at least on a full-time basis: According to Jin, the product will be 'able to rest in one's pocket or on one's desk' and complement an iPhone and MacBook Pro without supplanting them. Whatever this thing is, Jin cites Altman predicting that it will sell 100 million units faster than any product before it. In 2007, by contrast, Apple forecast selling a more modest 10 million iPhones in the phone's first full year on the market—a challenging goal at the time, though the company surpassed it. Now, discounting the possibility of something transformative emerging from OpenAI-IO would be foolish. Ive, after all, may have played a leading role in creating more landmark tech products than anyone else alive. Altman runs the company that gave us the most significant one of the past decade. But Ive rhapsodizing over their working relationship in the video isn't any more promising a sign than him rhapsodizing over the $10,000 solid gold Apple Watch was in 2015. And Altman, the biggest investor in Humane's doomed AI Pin, doesn't seem to have learned one of the most obvious lessons of that fiasco: Until you have a product in the market, it's better to tamp down expectations than stoke them. You can't accuse Apple of hyping any smart glasses it might release in 2026. It hasn't publicly acknowledged their existence, and won't until their arrival is much closer. If anything, the company may be hypersensitive to the downsides of premature promotion. Almost a year ago, it began trumpeting a new AI-infused version of Siri—one it clearly didn't have working at the time, and still hasn't released. After that embarrassing mishap, silencing the skeptics will require shipping stuff, not previewing what might be ahead. Even companies that aren't presently trying to earn back their AI cred should take note and avoid repeating Apple's mistake. I do believe AI demands that we rethink how computers work from the ground up. I also hope the smartphone doesn't turn out to be the last must-have device, because if it were, that would be awfully boring. Maybe the best metric of success is hitting Apple's 10-million-units-per-year goal for the original iPhone—which, perhaps coincidentally, is the same one set by EssilorLuxottica, the manufacturer of Meta's smart Ray-Bans. If anything released next year gets there, it might be the landmark AI gizmo we haven't yet seen. And if nothing does, we can safely declare that 2026 wasn't the year of consumer AI hardware after all.
