In a packed theater at Fort Mason, after a whirlwind keynote of product announcements, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman sat down with Sir Jony Ive, the legendary designer behind Apple’s most iconic products. The conversation, held exclusively for the 1,500 developers in attendance and not part of the public livestream, offered the clearest glimpse yet into the philosophy and ambition behind their secretive collaboration to build a new “family” of AI-powered devices.The partnership, solidified by OpenAI’s staggering $6.5 billion acquisition of Ive’s hardware startup Io in May, has been the subject of intense speculation.While concrete product details remained under wraps, the discussion pivoted away from specifications and toward a profound, almost therapeutic mission: to fix our broken relationship with technology.For nearly 45 minutes, Ive, in his signature thoughtful cadence, articulated a vision that feels like both a continuation of and a repentance for his life’s work. The man who designed the iPhone, a device that arguably defined the modern era of personal computing, is now on a quest to cure the very anxieties it helped create.Jony Ive’s post-Apple mission, clarified by ChatGPTThe collaboration, Ive explained, was years in the making, but it was the launch of ChatGPT that provided a sudden, clarifying purpose for his post-Apple design collective, LoveFrom.”With the launch of ChatGPT, it felt like our purpose for the last six years became clear,” Ive said. “We were starting to develop some ideas for an interface based on the capability of the technology these guys were developing… I’ve never in my career come across anything vaguely like the affordance, like the capability that we’re now starting to sense.”This capability, he argued, demands a fundamental rethinking of the devices we use, which he descr …
