Jony Ive is now looking for funding to jump on the AI development train
Former Apple head designer Jony Ive is looking for big money from known artificial intelligence venture capitalists to build his mysterious assistant product.
A report on Friday again links Jony Ive with Open AI funding source Thrive Capital, and newly connects Laurene Powell-Jobs' Emerson collective to the effort. According to sources, Ive is looking for $1 billion in funding to get the effort off the ground.
This is not the first time that Ive has been connected to an AI peripheral of some sort. In September, Ive was linked with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son to make
Friday's report from The Information sheds no new light on what Ive is looking to accomplish. Previous reports claimed that Ive had having brainstorming sessions at his San Francisco studio with OpenAI's Sam Altman. Thosse sessions were said to have been centered on what a new consumer product with OpenAI technology could do, and could look like.
As is typical, nobody the publication reached out to had any comment on the matter.
In the long run, the effort is likely to put Ive at loggerheads with Apple. Ive left Apple in 2019 to create his own independent design consultancy, LoveFrom, following nearly three decades at the company.
While going independent has given Ive the chance to work with other companies, the firm he founded was still connected to Apple for a time.
For example, in May 2021, it was reported that Ive had worked on the 24-inch iMac, a major redesign of the desktop Mac. However, due to the typically long development process for hardware designs, it's plausible that Ive was still employed at Apple at the time of his involvement, rather than it being work carried out as part of LoveFrom.
In 2022, reports circulated that Ive was no longer consulting with Apple.
Apple hasn't been standing still on the AI front. As it stands now, machine learning and artificial intelligence routines span nearly every aspect of Apple's hardware and services.
CEO Tim Cook has said that the company will have announcements before the end of 2024. In an X post shortly after the official announcement of WWDC 2024, Greg Joswiak made a post promoting the WWDC news.
The Apple SVP of Marketing's post tells developers to "Mark your calendars for #WWDC24," confirming both the date and the official hashtag for the event.
"Joz" then follows up with the declaration "It's going to be Absolutely Incredible!" Joswiak's post does include a hint, but it doesn't require an Enigma machine to work out the capitalized "Absolutely Incredible" refers to AI.
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Comments
the rich guy looking for a handout
It never ceases to shock and amaze me how people who deliberately refuse to become financially savvy are the first to chastise anyone and everyone they deem rich, who in reality is anyone a tiny bit wealthier than themselves.
Here's some great advice...
Stop criticizing everyone, even truly bad people. Take charge of your own life. Follow the lead of those who have become a success even if you don't know them personally. Don't let failure stop you because you will fail. Keep going. One day, you will be pleasantly surprised with your nest egg, and your kindness in not criticizing others will be a shining beacon to all around you.
Bigger question — are consumers as excited about AI as much as the companies promoting it?
Amazingly said JDW! Spot on and a great philosophy for life.
I do hope Apple will let Beats make more interesting versions of their products. We have seen 25 years of TiBook design and the iPhone 15 Pro looks like the iPhone 4. Coke bottles and Lego blocks don't change much either. I just feel there could be new designs, colors, materials,...
I'm pretty skeptical of consumer oriented generative LLM devices. If it is a voice only device, I think it fails. Voice interfaces are horrible. It's non-deterministic and low information density while taking high cognitive load. It is just not something a large fraction of the market will get into imo. It would be an interesting feature to see evolve on our existing devices, but even there, I wonder how popular it will be. It will have to be something very suitable for those types of models.
On the backend and for services, we will surely be tortured by chat bots. Travel agents, helper chat bots, etc. Yeah, it's already quite frustrating to try to talk to a human for this or that during a phone call, but now there is or will be an additional gate of the chat bot sounding human, designed to not help while making the wall ever higher to get some kind of customer service.
Don't understand why there is so much enthusiasm from the tech mediarati for this. They are bored, just like in the first round of voice interfaces when Amazon Echo/Alexa devices was the new "it" technology. Apple was so far behind there as I recall. The Internet of Things? Machine learning? VR? I'm not even sure why people think Apple needs to have "AI" when it primarily exists as a search service and eventually, primarily driven by ad sales, something that is not Apple.