This month, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, made a significant stride by announcing a $6.5 billion acquisition of io. The startup belongs to former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI"s current CEO, Sam Altman, and it"s working on a mysterious AI gadget. Interestingly, another person who benefited from this deal and its future outcomes is Steve Jobs"s wife, Laurene Powell Jobs.
With a net worth of over $14 billion, Powell Jobs is the founder and president of Emerson Collective, an investment firm. After Ive left Apple in 2019 and founded his businesses, LoveFrom and io, Powell Jobs seized the opportunity to invest in both startups. The investment is said to exceed $1 billion.
In an interview with The Financial Times, Jony Ive and Powell Jobs discussed their experience working with Steve Jobs as well as the dark side of technology. Ive said one of his incentives for collaborating with OpenAI and Sam Altman is that "humanity deserves better." In another interview in May, Jony Ive also hinted at the "unintended consequences" of his work at Apple that "were far from pleasant."
"If you make something new, if you innovate, there will be consequences unforeseen, and some will be wonderful and some will be harmful," Ive added. "While some of the less positive consequences were unintentional, I still feel responsibility. And the manifestation of that is a determination to try and be useful."
Laurene Powell Jobs also confirmed Jony Ive"s comments, adding that "there are dark uses for certain types of technology," even if the tech wasn"t initially designed with that kind of use in mind.
"You can only look at the studies being done on teenage girls and on anxiety in young people, and the rise of mental health needs, to understand that we"ve gone sideways. Certainly, technology wasn"t designed to have that result. But that is the sideways result."
Apple"s former design chief also endorsed Powell Jobs"s involvement in LoveFrom, saying the company could not exist without her help. Yet, the product Ive and OpenAI have in mind is still a mystery, but some people speculated that it might be a screenless AI phone.
Meanwhile, some analysts believe the collaboration between Ive and OpenAI should raise the alarms for Apple.