In this story
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is teaming up with former Apple (AAPL) design chief Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs, to launch a new artificial intelligence device company.
Intel’s tough year won’t dampen investment appetite
Ive confirmed the Tin project in an interview with The New York Times published on Saturday. It all started last year, according to a former Apple executive, when Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, a close friend of Altman’s and a client of Ive’s design firm, LoveFrom, arranged a dinner for the two.
From there, Altman and Ive met and decided to build a new device, with Ive in charge of the design. Emerson Collective, the company Ive and Powell Jobs founded, has already provided funding, according to the Times. The startup could have raised $1 billion by the end of the year.
The top-secret project already has a physical office space and 10 employees, including key staffers such as Tang Tang, who led the product design teams for the iPhone and Apple Watch, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Ive as Apple’s head of design.
Ive left Apple in July 2019 after nearly three decades with the iPhone maker, and soon after founded his own design studio, LoveFrom.
The Information first reported the talks between Altman and Ive about an AI hardware project a year ago.
Meanwhile, Altman’s OpenAI, the developer of the popular generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, is in talks with investors to raise billions in new funding, valuing the company at more than $100 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
The funding round is reported to include major players such as Apple, Microsoft (MSFT) and semiconductor giant Nvidia (NVDA), which is in talks to invest $100 million. Nvidia has invested about $13 billion in startups, including a $10 billion pledge in January 2023, and holds 49% of OpenAI’s interests.
Over the past two years, OpenAI has become the most influential generative AI company on the market, and ChatGPT hit 100 million weekly users earlier this year, sparking a boom in genAI and chatbots thanks to the success of its flagship model.
With all this growth, OpenAI’s influence and value continue to snowball: A deal allowing employees to sell stock in the company valued it at $86 billion late last year, nearly triple what it was at the start of 2023.
