If Abu Dhabi 5 Gigawatt world’s biggest, maybe, data center, wasn’t enough, Sam Altman announced on May 21 that OpenAI was purchasing the company started by Jony Ives, formerly designer for iconic mobile Apple products. The new joint corporation is called “IO” and has some sort of joint operating structure where the formerly two companies work together to created new alternative forms of hardware.
We aren’t told as yet, what that hardware might look like, or what the series of their new devices might be, or how they would work, other than they would be a hardware platform for OpenAI software access and use. First available said to be 2026, which isn’t that far away.
Wall Street takeaway is that IO is coming for the current mobile platforms of Apple and Google. OpenAI CFO discusses “multiple modality” as a goal for the hardware from IO.
Alert observers might have noticed that when Altman was recently doing Q&A at Sequoia Capital, he mentioned how college kids were using ChatGPT as an Operating System…and he also noted that OpenAI was trying to put their eggs into “one thing” that would do it all. Hmmm.
That sounds a bit like an operating system for “IO” devices that runs the whole of ChatGPT as “one thing”. And the name is short and very generic…suitable for taking over as the name of these devices a a category, much as iPhone now stands for “smart phone” in many instances. Or the way Kleenex means soft tissue no matter who is the manufacturer.