There aren't many details. He met Altman through Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, and the project is funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs' company. New York Times claims it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year. There was no mention of Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank who was rumored to have invested $1 billion in the project last year.
The project currently employs just 10 people, but they include Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone. And as for the device itself? Last year, there were rumors that it was inspired by touchscreen technology and the original iPhone, which makes sense given the involvement of Tan and Hankey.
There is no timetable yet as to when we will learn more about this project, but the little information provided in the New York Times sound very familiar to anyone who has followed the AI hardware scene over the last year:
Mr Altman and Mr Ive talked about how generative AI enabled the development of a new computing device because the technology could do more for users than traditional software, as it could summarize and prioritize messages, identify and name objects such as plants, and ultimately answer complex queries such as booking travel.