Jony Ive says he's juggling up to 20 ideas for OpenAI gadgets (www.businessinsider.com)

OpenAI’s acquisition of Jony Ive’s device startup (for more than $6 billion) appears to be paying off creatively: at OpenAI’s DevDay, Ive said his team is juggling 15–20 distinct product ideas for a “family of AI devices” that will likely not resemble smartphones or tablets. He framed the effort as a chance to redesign human-technology relationships — making devices that reduce anxiety, feel fun and inevitable, and prioritize richer person-to-person interfaces rather than replicating the high-end, exclusive phone experience he helped define at Apple. Sam Altman, acting as interviewer, and prior OpenAI comments about an “AI companion” suggest tight hardware–software integration is intended. For the AI/ML community this is consequential. Combining Ive’s industrial design with OpenAI’s generative models points toward new form factors and UX paradigms (multimodal interfaces, always-on companions, or distributed device ecosystems) that will drive requirements for low-latency inference, edge/cloud orchestration, privacy-preserving models, and safety/ethics engineering. It also signals a potential competitive threat to incumbents like Apple by rethinking how AI is embodied and experienced. The team’s current challenge—choosing which ideas to focus on—underscores both the rapid momentum in AI productization and the need for disciplined design and deployment choices.