OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is collaborating with former Apple design executive Jony Ive and Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, to establish a new company focused on artificial intelligence devices.
Jony Ive confirmed the project, called Tin, in an interview on Saturday.
The idea took root when Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb and a close friend of Altman’s, who also happens to be a client of Ive’s design firm LoveFrom, arranged a dinner meeting between Altman and Ive last year.
Following that initial encounter, Altman and Ive continued to meet regularly and eventually decided to create a new device, with Ive leading the design.
Both Ive and Emerson Collective, a company founded by Powell Jobs, have already made contributions to the project. The startup could potentially secure up to $1 billion in funding by the end of the year.
The secretive project now has a physical office and a team of 10 employees. Among the key team members are Tang Tan, who previously led product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, and Evans Hankey, who succeeded Ive as Apple’s design chief after he left the company.
Jony Ive departed from Apple in July 2019 after nearly three decades with the tech giant and went on to establish his own design studio, LoveFrom, shortly afterward.
Speculation about the collaboration between Altman and Ive on an AI hardware initiative first surfaced a year ago, when it was reported by The Information.
Meanwhile, Altman’s company, OpenAI, which is responsible for the widely popular generative AI chatbot ChatGPT, is currently in discussions with several investors to raise billions of dollars in additional funding.
This funding could bring OpenAI’s valuation to more than $100 billion. The fundraising efforts have reportedly attracted significant interest from major players, including Apple, Microsoft, and Nvidia.
Nvidia, which holds a 49% share of OpenAI’s profits after investing around $13 billion in the startup—$10 billion of which was contributed in January 2023—is reportedly considering a $100 million investment in this latest round.
Over the past two years, OpenAI has become the dominant force in the generative AI market. Its flagship product, ChatGPT, reached 100 million weekly users earlier this year, igniting a surge of interest in generative AI and chatbots.
As OpenAI’s user base and influence have grown, so has its valuation. A deal last year that allowed employees to sell shares valued the company at $86 billion, nearly tripling its value from earlier in the same year.
This momentum underscores OpenAI’s continuing rise as a key player in the tech industry, with both its influence and value surging.
