SAN FRANCISCO — The artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT said Wednesday it will develop devices for individuals to use the technology. Partnering with the creative director of the Apple iPhone, OpenAI named Jony Ive as its creative and design director. 

What You Need To Know

  • The artificial intelligence company behind ChatGPT said Wednesday it will develop devices for individuals to use the technology

  • Partnering with the creative director of the Apple iPhone, OpenAI named Jony Ive as its creative and design director

  • “I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a video announcement Wednesday

  • Ive is the founder of a startup called io Products that OpenAI has now acquired to help develop “the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen,” Altman said in the video

“I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer,” OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said in a movie-like, nine-minute video posted to the company’s website Wednesday. 

Ive designed some of the most successful products in Apple history — the iPhone and Macbook Pro. He is also the founder of a startup called io that OpenAI has now acquired to help develop “the coolest piece of technology the world will have ever seen,” Altman said in the video.

Altman said he already has one of the io prototypes, the details of which won’t be shared until next year. The technology products people are currently using are incredible, he said, but they are also decades old. 

“It’s just common sense to at least think, surely there’s something beyond these legacy products,” Altman said. “We have, like, magic intelligence in the cloud.” 

In a video structured as a conversation at a San Francisco coffee shop, Ive agreed that the technology of the past shouldn’t be the guidepost for the future. 

“You should look at the people who are making the decisions,” he said. “You should look at what drives and motivates and look at values.”

Ive and the creative collective known as LoveFrom have been working with Altman for two years. In a joint statement, they said, “It became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company” called io.

Its mission is to figure out how to create a family of devices “that would let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things,” Ive said.

OpenAI currently makes a variety of products that use artificial intelligence, including the ChatGPT chatbot that can generate text and answer questions, the storytelling platform Sora and the image generator DALL-E 3.