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Below is wild speculation: > Five years to the week after he walked away from the top job designing the iPhone [1] Sounds to me like OpenAI is going to make it's own consumer device. Maybe designed by the AI itself. The AI Is choosing it's own body? [1]: https://archive.is/yixNr#selection-615.0-615.81 "After Apple, Jony Ive Is Building an Empire of His Own" - NYT
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
Just to stem pointless debates before they flame up - both these acquisitions appear to be primarily if not exclusively for stock. Sure, if you want to get into theoretical finance, OpenAI could have sold these new shares for cash, so technically there's no difference, but OpenAI is only spending opportunity cost cash, rather than fiat. OpenAI's fiat likely still goes to the things you'd expect, like training models…
Developers now spend excessive time crafting prompts and managing AI generated pull requests :-) tasks that a simple email to a junior coder could have handled efficiently. We need a study that shows the lost productivity.
When CEOs aggressively promote such tech solutions, it signals we're deep into bubble territory:
“If you go forward 24 months from now, or some amount of time — I can’t exactly predict where it is — it’s possible that most developers are not coding.”
- Matt Garman – CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS) - June 2024
- Stability AI CEO Emad Mostaque - 2023
- Satya Nadella – CEO of Microsoft - April 2025
- Jensen Huang CEO, NVIDIA - Feb 2024
- OpenAI's CPO Kevin Weil - March 2025
- Mark Zuckerberg - Jan 2025
- Dario Amodei - Anthropic CEO - March 2025$6,500,000,000 dollars for ... what, exactly?
55 engineers and the opportunity to be associated with Apple products via Jony Ive. Honestly with OpenAI buying Windsurf, and now this (whatever this is) I'd say that the company is in trouble and is now desperately attempting to buy it's way into relevancy. Either OpenAI wants to become a developer tools company (which can't be that profitable), or a consumer goods company. Trying to become the next Apple is really…
So they paid $5B to hire Jony Ive? Is there even a product or just all vibes?
No question that Ive is a legend, but I do think the fall of Humane (also ex-Apple) and the challenges at Meta, Apple, and Google in terms of VR/AR adoption (Meta Ray Ban, Apple Vision, Google Glasses and the new thing) are instructive here. The $6.5B almost feels like the largest ever aquihire.
Agreed. It's hard to think of a new product category for smart devices ... unless maybe Smart HATS! OK folks so remember where you heard it first - ultra stylish head gear with flip-down visor screen anyone?
This acquisition (and the Windsurf acquisition) are all-stock deals, which have the added benefit of reducing the control the nonprofit entity has over the for profit OpenAI entity.
How do you extract the for profit entity out of the hands of a nonprofit? - Step 1: you have close friends or partners at a company - with no product, users, or revenue - valued at 6.5billion. - Step 2: you acquire that entity, valuing it unreasonably high so that the nonprofit’s stake is diluted. - And now control of OpenAI (the PBC) is in the hands of for profit entities.
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And many of those designs were made at Ive's behest, against the wishes of entire teams of engineers. I feel like we have his "courage" to blame for the Butterfly keyboard, terrible Mac thermals and the lack of ports on "Pro" computers.
I had the butterfly keyboard for 5 years yet I didn't have a single problem with it. And I'm a long time mechanical keyboards user. What is all the hate about?
First Windsurf and now this. OpenAI is spending billions like there's nothing else to use this money for while being seemingly cash strapped for model training since they already signaled more investment rounds would be needed to remain competitive. They're trying to become too big to fail before they have a moat which won't work well.
tbh has jony ive produced any remarkable hardware piece since he left apple? Can't think of any maybe im wrong he must be buying the name or something or just the brains idk
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> No question that Ive is a legend Not sure why he deserves to be a legend, to be honest, but yes, he is a legend. He did a good job, but those small and minimalistic designs were only possible because of the efforts of entire teams of engineers, of which the public never heard anything.
I absolutely despise comments like these, and you only see them on HN. It's like saying great architects aren't great, it's the construction workers who should get the credit.