It is the most important acquisition of Openai, with a transaction which rises to $ 6.5 billion in actions to afford iothe Hardware design startup founded by Jonathan IVE. A very strong symbolic and strategic operation, which does not fail to fuel the debates of the Tech ecosystem of the valley.
Announced on Open Ai’s blog and illustrated with an interview between Jonathan IVE and Sam Altman, the creator of the design of the iPhone and the MacBook Pro, aims to reinvent the way humans interact with the machine, in the era of generative artificial intelligence. A bet that Sam Altman describes as an attempt to “completely rethink what a computer means.”
The two men met two years ago and very quickly, a consensus won, neither Openai ni Lovefrom, the IVE studio, cannot, alone, design the next computer terminal. You need a third entity. It will be Io.
Today the team counts 55 engineers, designers and researchersfrom Apple in particular, and has been working for a year on a first prototype with the aim of a commercial outing in 2026.
This new terminal, still (very) confidential, wants to exceed the limits of laptop, smartphone and the touch interface to be a simple, intuitive, almost invisible object. A FORM FACTOR that allows everyone to activate the power of AI models as chatgpt without going through complex interfaces And without reproducing the pitfalls of products that are too gadgets or poorly thought out, such as the Humane Ai Pin or the R1 Rabbit. In short, a brief cut for creatives!
“” We are still in the terminal phase of IA interactions. We have not yet found the equivalent of the graphical interface, but we will find it », Recognizes Sam Altman.
With this acquisition, Openai continues its logic of vertical integration for Take control of the user experience, from start to finish. Thus this acquisition is part of a series of operations carried out by Openai. In the space of a few months, the firm got hold of Windsurf (Coding assisted by IA, $ 3 billion), Rockset (analytical databases), and has invested in the robotic startup Physical Intelligencesupported by Jeff Bezos. These initiatives converge on the objective of bringing out a complete ecosystem, from the model to the interface, from the infrastructure to the object.
With this acquisition, Openai is putting itself in its race lane, alongside experienced competitors in hardware / software integration. A challenge that Jonathan Ive must now take up, who despite his collaborations, has not released any notorious public product since his departure from Apple in 2019. That being a few hours after the announcement, the Apple action fell by more than 2 %.
