Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

991–1000 of 1001 posts

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#991

Post by strangattractor »

jonnat wrote: post #212
strangattractor wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The headline then is "Sam Altman pays Johnny Ive $6.6Bn to become his Collaborator". Not a bad idea really IMHO.

He most definitely did not pay $6.6B. The beauty of these OpenAI acquisitions is that they are all-stock transactions so only worth the face value in the make-believe world OpenAI investors seem to live in.

Your right it's all funny money until they are publicly traded but if they are successful it is still a ton of money. Johnny needs to feed a GulfStream - that isn't cheap;)

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#992

Post by killerstorm »

anonzzzies wrote: post #931
killerstorm wrote: post #893

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Full attention to 1M context is nonsense. Yes, Gemini can do needle-in-haystack, but do you actually need to feed 1M tokens to find one thing? People who have a lot of experience with using LLM for code generation claim that performance degrades past certain point, even if all context is somewhat-relevant. What we need is not "long context", we need memory: ability for LLM to address datasets of arbitrary size. RAG h…

Our company has development documents, guidelines, api's going back almost 20 years. If you follow them, life is good, if you don't, things don't work. The 20 years is relevant because this is a lot of text + code. When we give this to o3, o4-mini, claude 3.5/7 it just ignores rules randomly; when we give it to gemini 2.5 pro preview, it just works. And after prompting multiple times in chat, the other models just st…

"Context compression" is something a tool like Cursor does, not the model itself. It seems like the tool you're using works better with Gemini.

From my experience, pretty much all coding tools have their quirks.

I generally agree that Gemini is a very strong model, but I don't think we can at this point we can conclusively say Google would win because of the long context.

It's too much to extrapolate from a single case. E.g. I see Gemini struggling with editing files a bit more than other models, but I'd say it's just growing pains rather than something fundamental

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#993

Post by dr_dshiv »

fckgw wrote: post #702
firtoz wrote: post #664

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with its founder not even joining after an acquisition. So, not really an aquihire either. What do you mean? > Sir Jony Ive will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities” to build new products for OpenAI

Sounds like OpenAI is basically just becoming a client of LoveFrom, Ive's design firm.

$6,500,000,000…

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#994

Post by vaxman »

hbn wrote: post #956
quitit wrote: post #830

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bit of a risk for Ive, as until now he is credited with Apple's lauded design. If he does not produce an immediate success it'll be brand damaging and wobble on his reputation. I also suspect it might go that way: post-Ive designs have been credited as being better, particularly around apple's laptops that were perceived as too heavily favouring form over function. More realistically Apple's design is good…

Jobs has been dead for almost 15 years, he's already had plenty of time to prove himself. By the time he left Apple he was known for his obsession with thinness at the cost of function (if not straight up ruining the product), such as that stupid keyboard design from the late 2010s that sucked to type on, had failure rates comparable to the Xbox 360's RRoD, and was somewhere in the ballpark of $700 to repair because…

Ive designed bathroom fixtures before Apple and had been parked at Apple making the dumbest looking computers you can image for a very long time until my Dad's lifelong coworker brought Steve back --something I am on record telling people would be the only thing that would save Apple's arse (usually adding that Hell would freeze over before that happened). When Steve returned, he found all they had left was an ability to make laptops and so, the race was on to surround them with fixtures..enter his old pal Jony Ive. In the time since, things got a bit out of hand (pun intended) with the Vision Pro, he's moved on and Tim Apple figured out a way to get all the R&D money back...but

    did Ive just land $6B+ for incarnating "Dr. Theopolis"?
Yes, https://youtu.be/1ZCxXjDlaf8 yes, I think he did... Good on Him! :D

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#996

Post by etruong42 »

rchaud wrote: post #690
paxys wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Money isn't real anymore.

Money is real. Privately held company valuations are not. This is an all-stock deal, so what it's "worth" is entirely in the eye of the beholder. Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running, or how much they can offload to Mayasoshi Son and Arab Gulf sovereign funds.

> Its value rises and falls based on how long the hype train can keep running

Exactly - money is hype. Hype is money. Which goes into the foundation of money to begin with: confidence and faith. And the levers of power which move that confidence and faith are decreasing in number and increasing in length/leverage.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#997

Post by detourdog »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #766
gist wrote: post #693

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Also noting what happened with Ron Johnson (Apple Stores) after he left Apple (and was not surrounded by either Jobs or others that worked at Apple: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ron_Johnson_(businessman) I am wondering to what extent 'key man' insurance is needed. That's a big purchase to be riding on one man essentially (yes they are getting engineers and others but Jony seems to be the big ticket item for…

I don't think Ron Johnson is really analogous to Ive. Ron Johnson's job where he had the most success was where he was selling fundamentally desirable and great products. I think you would have to be pretty shitty at retail to not do a good job selling iPods and iPhones. His subsequent 2 endeavors, JC Penney and Enjoy, were complete flops. It turns out selling middle-market goods is just really f'ing hard. Ive, on th…

Apple has always been a design company and if Ives wasn't there someone else would have filled the void.

From my memory

David Kelley and IDEO designed the original Macintosh Hermutt Esslinger and Frog Design did I think the SE's and Macintosh II and II CI. Robert Bruner and Lunar Design did the Quadra's Robert Bruner also Hired Ives.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#998

Post by piva00 »

osigurdson wrote: post #928
asveikau wrote: post #843

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does Ive need to be churning out continuous hits? There is no shame in quitting while ahead, or considering your previous success to be a tough act to follow. I feel similar about Zuckerberg. That guy should just let the government break up his empire, let some other people run the pieces, and retire. Otherwise he just faces humiliation and being in over his head. But I guess ego keeps these people going.

I think having a founder stay on and lead, well after they are financially independent is very respectable. It says they are interested in more than just chilling on the beach.

> It says they are interested in more than just chilling on the beach.

Which is not necessarily a good thing, being more interested in reshaping the world even after it becomes clear their vision for the new world isn't making it better just leaves someone with lots of power and bad ideas, not a good combo.

I'd much rather have them chilling on the beach after being done with the limits of their competence.

Re: OpenAI to buy AI startup from Jony Ive

#999

Post by vonneumannstan »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #761
vonneumannstan wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can say the same about any piece of software...

Except for those pieces of software like Google Search, MS Windows, Office, Adobe Photoshop, Intuit Quickbooks, etc. etc. etc.

No piece of software inherently makes money on its own... You have to monetize Google search by running ads, Windows by adding subscriptions, etc. Thats not tied specifically to the software that actually drives the value for a consumer
Post reply on HN