Jony Ive's career was mainly at Apple, designing products like the iPhone and Mac. Now he'll work at OpenAI, which bought his AI device startup io.

Jony Ive is renowned for crafting a meticulous product design aesthetic that shaped the tech cultural zeitgeist during a 27-year career at Apple. He did his most influential work after Apple co-founder Steve Jobs returned to run the company in 1997,

More details are trickling out about Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s new AI device. In a post on Thursday, Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo says his research indicates that the device could be larger than Humane’s AI pin, but with a “form factor as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle.”

Apple’s own struggles with artificial intelligence lend additional power to this narrative. In one of its most damaging setbacks in years, it has failed to come up with a set of AI features that it promised would transform the way people complete tasks on the iPhone.

In a move that casts a shadow across Apple’s upcoming Worldwide Developer’s Conference, OpenAI has announced that it will purchase io, the AI startup founded by acclaimed former Apple designer Sir Jony Ive, who helped create the iMac, iPod, and iPhone.

There have been public failures as well, such as the Humane AI Pin and the Rabbit R1 personal assistant device. “Those were very poor products,” said Ive, 58. “There has been an absence of new ways of thinking expressed in products.”

The hand of Jony Ive is all around us: on our desks, in our pockets, in our palms. More than any other living designer, Apple’s former design chief has shaped and contoured our day-to-day experience. Yet unlike the buzzing, attention-hungry iPhone – his most earth-shaking effigy – the man himself is much less forthcoming.