Last year, in a what’s-that-guy-been-up-to profile in the New York Times, legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive explained how he’d been filling his time. He’d founded a small design firm, LoveFrom, which was working on projects including a “Christie’s auction stand, Airbnb graphics and a Ferrari interior,” and expanded his real-estate holdings in his favorite neighborhood in San Francisco. He’d attempted to reinvent the jacket button for Moncler. He also revealed plans for a new “artificial intelligence device company that he was developing with OpenAI.”

This week, they made things official:

Sam & Jony introduce io pic.twitter.com/ej5K59kJq3

There isn’t a whole lot of information contained in this strange video, in which Altman and Ive profess to be friends, and demonstrate their friendship by describing each other in competitively superlative terms (“@grok summarise this, aint no body watching 10mins,” writes the top commenter on X). We learn that both Ive and Altman have distinct but equally cartoonish gaits. We find out from Ive that Altman is a “rare visionary.” We hear from Altman that Ive is “the deepest thinker over anyone [he’s] ever met.” We’re told by Altman that Ive’s design firm is the “densest collection of talent that I’ve ever heard of in one place and probably has ever existed in the world.” We learn that Ive believes his early AI projects are “the best work our team has ever done,” and from Altman that the prototype of Ive’s first device is “​​the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”

The accompanying announcement, which is fittingly templated and illustrated like a wedding website, doesn’t give us much more, though it does hint at some of the procedural strangeness of the arrangement: “As io merges with OpenAI, Jony and LoveFrom will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io,” the company says, glossing over an arrangement that, despite a $6.5 billion deal made up of OpenAI equity, leaves Ive and LoveFrom independent, even as they “take over design for all of........

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