Sam Altman and Jony Ive say they want OpenAI’s mysterious device to be so irresistible that you might be tempted to eat it. But the pair recently revealed that at least one attempt wasn’t that appetizing.
“There was an earlier prototype that we were quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of, I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out of it,” Altman said during an onstage conversation last week with Ive moderated by Laurene Powell Jobs at the Emmerson Collective’s DemoDay. “And then, finally, we got there all of a sudden.”
Altman said it was Ive who came up with the unusual-sounding test.
“I remember he said once early on, we’ll know we have the design right?” Altman said. “I don’t remember whether he said, when you want to lick it or take a bite out of it, or something like that.”
A later prototype, Altman said, “finally got there.”
Altman and Ive have continued to stay mostly mum about the details of OpenAI’s long-awaited consumer device, which led the frontier model maker to team up with Ive, the legendary iPhone designer. After persistent prodding, Ive told Jobs that the OpenAI device will be available in “even less than” two years.
In May, OpenAI announced that it was buying Ive’s AI hardware startup, IO, for roughly $6.5 billion. The pair also revealed that they were collaborating on a “family of AI products.” Consumer devices are just one of the many industries OpenAI is trying to disrupt.
When people see their device, Altman said he hopes their reaction is, “That’s it.”
“Like it is so simple, but then it just does, as we were talking about, AI can do just so much for you that so much can fall away,” Altman said. “And the degree to which Jony has chipped away at every little thing that this doesn’t need to do or doesn’t need to be in there is remarkable.”
Altman said that he and Ive want their device to spark joy, a feeling he contrasted with how using current devices feels like “walking through Times Square” as users are bombarded by notifications.
“I understand how we got here, but I don’t think it’s making any of our lives peaceful and calm and just letting us focus on other stuff,” he said.
Ive said that the best-designed products come with a “sense of inevitability” that belies the amount of thought and care that went into their creation.
“I can’t bear products that are like a dog wagging their tail in your face, or products that are so proud that they solved a complicated problem, they want to remind you of how hard it was,” he said. “I love solutions that teeter on appearing almost naive in their simplicity.”
