OpenAI and Jony Ive In Talks To Raise $1 Billion To Build 'iPhone for AI' (ft.com) 24
OpenAI is in advanced talks with former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive and SoftBank's Masayoshi Son to launch a venture to build the "iPhone of artificial intelligence," FT reported Thursday, fuelled by more than $1bn in funding from the Japanese conglomerate. From the report: Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief, has tapped Ive's company LoveFrom, which the designer founded when he left Apple in 2019, to develop the ChatGPT creator's first consumer device, according to three people familiar with the plan. Altman and Ive have held brainstorming sessions at the designer's San Francisco studio about what a new consumer product centred on OpenAI's technology would look like, the people said.
They hope to create a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI, in the way that the iPhone's innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass-market potential of the mobile internet. The process of identifying a design or device remains at an early stage with many different ideas on the table, they said. Son, SoftBank's founder and chief executive, has also been involved in some of the discussions, pitching a central role for Arm -- the chip designer in which the Japanese conglomerate holds a 90 per cent stake -- as well as offering financial backing.
They hope to create a more natural and intuitive user experience for interacting with AI, in the way that the iPhone's innovations in touchscreen computing unleashed the mass-market potential of the mobile internet. The process of identifying a design or device remains at an early stage with many different ideas on the table, they said. Son, SoftBank's founder and chief executive, has also been involved in some of the discussions, pitching a central role for Arm -- the chip designer in which the Japanese conglomerate holds a 90 per cent stake -- as well as offering financial backing.
LLM says... (Score:1)
"AI phone home."
Two observations (Score:5, Insightful)
Article is paywalled, can't read
Instead of hiring an engineer to work on the tech, they hire a "designer" to make sure it looks good
Red flag warning!
Re: (Score:2)
Article is paywalled, can't read Instead of hiring an engineer to work on the tech, they hire a "designer" to make sure it looks good Red flag warning!
The part that's hilarious to me is that we're barely scratching the surface on these LLMs, just starting to figure out how to make them not suck so bad that everybody laughs at them constantly, only semi-constantly, and they're already looking to build a consumer device? Don't consumers have enough options for getting bad/provably false/completely made-up bs already? Do they really need a pocket device feeding them the digital daydreams of these LLMs? WTF?
It strikes me as a very cart before the horse way to
Re: (Score:2)
Article is paywalled, can't read
Instead of hiring an engineer to work on the tech, they hire a "designer" to make sure it looks good
Red flag warning!
That was a given when their stated goal is the be the Apple of something. A substandard product that doesn't do half of what the competitors can and costs 2-3 times as much.
Just another Android phone (Score:4, Insightful)
An Android phone with a GPT powered voice assistant, meh.
Re: (Score:2)
An Android phone with a GPT powered voice assistant
There's a little known company that starts with a "G" that probably has little bit of head start on that idea.
Re: (Score:2)
On the plus side the fastest way to pop the AI bubble might be for them to start trying to make their own hardware
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what we'll have is an army of mobile devices capable of generating AI porn but not much else.
Well, that would be more than previous AI hypes have gotten us.
Sooo, overheating, hard to repair, ... (Score:2)
..., excessively expensive and some other things nobody sane would want? Yep, fits the mindless hype.
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Came here to say that. I'll add: "... and includes planned obsolescence, slowing down with age to encourage you to upgrade..."
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Indeed.
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Apple already has Siri, which does AI processing locally to maintain privacy. The problem is running a classifier model on an embedded device is both energy intensive and relatively slow. OpenAI wants to ingest ALL your data so it can train more accurate models, Apple doesn't want to deal with that headache. The current language models are relatively stupid (requires lots of lookups) which makes it energy hungry, once you can optimize and scale that to an ARM chip, then privacy-conscious people may be inter
No more drunk dialing ex-significant others? (Score:5, Funny)
The AI would say "Seriously, dude, you know damn well the she's moved on. I'm not going to call her for you."
No One Needs AI in Phone! (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
No-one needs a phone, period.
But AI could be terribly helpful if they get it to work. Phones are fiddly little things. If they can work out what you want, they can do it for you, like alter deeper settings than are usually exposed or learn your patterns. Watch "Her" -- really good film about this.
iPhone of artificial intelligence (Score:2)
iPhone of artificial intelligence
IPhones are great. AI is great. How can it lose?
They shall call it⦠(Score:1)
The other day... (Score:2)