For three decades, working in the Silicon Valley, Jony Ive shaped the shell of the iMac, designed the appearance of the iPod and created the form factor for the iPhone. Almost all the major apple technologies that we touch, since the apogee of Alta Vista to today, have crossed the hands of IVE first.
Such a heritage has encouraged Sam Altman to recruit IVE, with the founder of Openai this week buying the former Apple designer startup for $ 6.5 billion (which represents at least 130 million vintage iPod shuffles) – then announcing, in a video of Davisy Davis Guggenheim, the two would work together to create a “family of non -disclosed devices” Applications based on applications on applications. Io, Io, let’s go for 4th we go.
Altman tries to convince investors and the public that he will change the course of civilization almost since he published Chatgpt thirty months ago (and really for a while before). What do you do if you hope to introduce the technology that everyone will use? You hire the man whose technology that everyone uses.
Well, that’s something you do. The other thing you can do is create programs that people cannot resist. On this score, Altman has a much coarse assessment. Chatgpt collected 100 million registrations during its first two months, but the momentum slowed down; Nowadays, around 5% of people on the planet are active users. New iterations of “reasoning” like 4o have not yet been current, while the programmer oriented O1 has not shown any problems. Meanwhile, the quest for AG Slogs, with little scientific evidence, we are close to a machine intelligence that corresponds to the full reasoning capacity of a human as soon as it is.
The main factor of these systems which does not wear completely by signing in our time fabric seem to have little to do with the shape they take. It is true that porn of the device is an inevitable part of any new adoption of consumers. But much more important, most industrial psychologists are what they allow us to do. And for all the buildings of the snacking life of applications based on OPENAI models (which, critically, the company is mainly based on others to develop), very little here has really revolutionized our existence so far. There are only so many notes of thanks and eccentric images that you can ask an AI program to create.
The proof that it is the application and not the machine is that the past attempts of devices specific to AI, from the R1 rabbit to the AI human spit, have so far been erased or obtained very bad criticism. But I think even more problematic here is that Altman makes a philosophical pivot not digestible even by his own rhetoric. The AI is different from previous technological revolutions, said Altman (correctly), because that does not just change what we can do, but what and how we think (or, more precisely, we don’t need to think).
The personal computer has brought digital technology to everyday people and the Internet connected us to communities and information to which we would not have access to otherwise. But if AI keeps its promise – and it remains a big so – it will make an even more fundamental change than that, introducing a whole new intelligence to live from American humans; It looks much more like an extraterrestrial landing on this planet than a product launch or even a scientific breakthrough.
As Altman himself wrote earlier this year (on Ag), it is “the beginning of something for which it is difficult not to say” this time it is different “; Economic growth in front of us seems astonishing, and we can now imagine a world where we heal all diseases, have much more time to take advantage with our families and can fully achieve our creative potential. ” Something so omnipresent does not go up or decrease according to how your device is cool, and spend 6.5 billion dollars to make sure that it came in excellent packaging only wonders if you do not have the goods for this omnipresent existentialism.
You might almost feel Altman and tackle this contradiction, writing in their blog article announcing the partnership: “It’s an extraordinary moment. Computers saw, thought and understanding. Despite this unprecedented ability, our experience remains shaped by traditional products and interfaces. ”
Also and on an unrelated note, it is a little Weird that Microsoft did not come in all of this. I mean, Openai is mainly supported by a company that makes tablets and other devices. One might think that Altman could have called Satya Nadella on anyone internally he could borrow before going out and writing a check for $ 6.5 billion to Apple guys.
AI agents are the place where Altman plans all this, and it can be on something – a kind of fusion of Siri and a CAA assistant to accompany us on all the little trips of life. The only thing he said in the Guggenheim video that landed is that an essential application like an AI agent requires something less clumsy than a laptop, although he has conveniently seemed to forget a phone. Google did not do it, and its competitor of Chatgpt Gemini, which is designed for Androids and iPhones, seems to make a lot of progress by integrating with the technology that we already have instead of selling one that we did not know that we wanted. (In fact, I wonder almost if desire that Google can come together so easily with its own phones is not a main engine for Altman here.)
Now, we should be wary, in all our caution with regard to media threshing, not to fall into a kind of future myopia either; Few people have planned a device in our pockets that can help us buy, date, hit and play before Steve Jobs announces the iPhone in January 2007 either. But you can understand the attraction of the realization of these activities, the constituent elements of modern existence, much more portable. We have not yet determined if an additional machine intelligence is almost as useful or safe in the first place, not to mention the packaging in which we want to stuff it if this is the case.
This is not all that the new interfaces will not be part of our digital future. The idea that a phone – a bulky rectangle that we read and touch – is the way we put our digital life is a technology accident or at least the result of only one of its many historical moments. While the world becomes more multimodal – Silicon Valley -Speak for how you can talk, look or make a gesture instead of the type – the idea of fingers and screens will become more outdated.
Altman is in good company with this belief. The newly relaunched Ray-Ban-Ban intelligent glasses of Meta are an attempt to fusion the power based on the cloud of AI chatbots with the concrete attraction of a fashion accessory, while Apple Vision pro also aims to give us immersiveness by wrapping around our faces instead of falling into our hands. The most bizarre but strangely the most promising of this harvest can be the “Ballie” of Samsung. The long -awaited robotic sphere which should finally arrive on the market this summer is a kind of home assistant who presented somewhere between a pet and a butler – a personalized BB -8 to help you feed the dog, perform your yoga session and translate your video call.
But although all these non -telephone products for aid offer are counting on the AI in one form or another, they are not motivated by the need to recalibrate how humanity thinks. Because these two proposals, although potentially linked, exist separately. We can or not to interact quickly with technology more intimately and differently from what we do currently (requiring a new IVE type design) and AI can or cannot help us soon in a way that we have never been helped before. Even if the two prove to be true, the idea that the same company would lead the two charges hardly corresponds to the history of the last three technological decades. IBM has made computers and Microsoft gave us office programs for them; Apple devices are everywhere and we survent them to use Google.
Of course, it is possible This company can do both, as it is also possible that I can become a award -winning chief. Nothing technically stops Openai. It’s just that a company whose entire resources and reason for being are oriented towards the way in which the machines will think for us do not seem to be the best suited to break a post-technical future that no one else has resolved to date. OPENAI manufactures models, new ways that computers may think and need developers to create applications on them. This is what the success of the company depends, and not to know if it can design a machine as addictive as the iPhone.
You could be forgiven, given the number of Openai announcements, to question Altman’s motivations; Like a vintage Terrell Owens, which often seemed to play football to support its press conference habit, Altman can sometimes seem to manage a technological business to feed its dependence on the post blog. The reality is lagging behind.
The IVE announcement corresponds to the trend. A device has as elegant and irresistible in 2030 that the iPhone was in 2010 seems to be an excellent idea, as great as amazing economic growth and all this free time. But the machine models are unable to give us all of this, and there are rare evidence Sam Altman or someone else understood how to build them so that they can.
