OpenAI recruits legendary iPhone designer Jony Ive to work on AI hardware in $6.5B deal

OpenAI has recruited Jony Ive, the designer behind Apple’s iPhone, to lead a new hardware project for the artificial intelligence company that makes ChatGPT.

OpenAI said it is acquiring io, a product and engineering company co-founded by Ive, in a deal valued at nearly $6.5 billion.

OpenAI said its CEO Sam Altman had been “quietly” collaborating since 2023 with Ive and his design firm, LoveFrom.

Ive worked at Apple for over two decades and is known for his work on iconic iPhone, iMac and iPad designs. Ive was Apple’s chief design officer before leaving the company in 2019 to start his own design firm.

In a joint letter posted on OpenAI’s website Wednesday, Ive and Altman said it “became clear that our ambitions to develop, engineer and manufacture a new family of products demanded an entirely new company.”

That’s when Ive co-founded io with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan.

OpenAI said Ive will not become an OpenAI employee and his design collective, LoveFrom, will remain independent but “will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io.” Both OpenAI and Ive’s design firm are based in San Francisco.

Leading the new io division for OpenAI will be longtime executive Peter Welinder, who led robotics research in the startup’s early years and more recently has been vice president of its “new product explorations” team that delves into hardware, robotics and other early stage research.

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