So on Wednesday, an unexpected video turned up on the internet. It was a meeting between Jony Ive and Sam Altman.

Johnny Ive, of course, has been the chief designer at Apple for many years, dating back to the time of The Newton even before Steve Jobs returned to company he founded. The best products Jony Ive designed were of course during Steve Jobs era.

Sam Altman is the charismatic leader of OpenAI.

After a lot of chatting, they finally revealed what this was all about, in the last 30 seconds of the video or so.

OpenAI is taking over for $6.5 billion, and I mean billion dollars, not LoveFrom, which is main company that Ive created, but IO, a company likely a spin-off of LoveFrom that he to produce or design an AI-era product.

After the Smartphone

There is rationale for this. Basically, they are suggesting that at some point there will be something that will replace the smartphone, but nobody knows what it is yet

But something is certain: it will be closely linked to the AI revolution we are experiencing.

Thus, a collaboration between OpenAI and this new company is probably well-positioned to create the right product. However, they did not specify what the product is.

There were two attempts to create such a device in the past year: one was called PIN , and it failed within a few months; the other called Rabbit is almost forgotten. Finding something to replace the smartphone is not easy. But they claim to know better and have something revolutionary that we will all.

Is this credible?

Many newspapers say yes, because they believe Ive created the Imac, MacBook, iPhone, etc.

They often forget the Newton, as they do not know Apple’s story.

The Apple Newton, 1993

The point is that it wasn’t just him who created those products; it was the duo of him and Steve Jobs.

While Ive may have made them beautiful – under Jobs’s direction – the functionalities were defined by Jobs and his colleagues.

After Steve Jobs’s death, when Johnny Ive was still with Apple, he led the creation of beautiful but unusable products, such as the MacBook pro which had to throttle down its CPU because it was so small that it overheated: customers ended up paying €3,000 for a computer operated at the speed of a $1,000 product.

Another example is the MacBook with just one USB port, which was used for both charging and data transfer—a decidedly impractical idea.

He also designed a mouse with the charging port on the bottom, making it unusable during charging and other decisions that clearly demonstrated his preference for aesthetics over usability.

Success is not guaranteed

Will they succeed in this new venture? We cannot really tell, but we suspect they migh if, and this is a big if, Sam Altman is as visionary and as technically proficient in the details as Jobs was. This could be reminiscent of recreating the successful duo that worked so well at Apple…. but we don’t know.

It remains unclear how much of OpenAI’s vision is attributable to Sam Alt and how much was developed independently.

GPT 2, GPT3, GPT4 (ChatGPT): those models are excellent due to years of research conducted by various companies, including Google and not solely Open AI.

It’s an exciting time. We will see if, in the future if indeed a product will replace the smartphone and if so if it can be more useful.

We rather thing what Google has recently presented, which are glasses with a very small screen that can be worn publicly without being ridicule has a better chance.

Better than a magic ring or whatever else they may have in mind. But of course , we do not know what they are planning, so only time will tell.