Jony Ive, Iconic Designer for Apple, Joins OpenAI

Today, OpenAI has announced that it’s purchased the remainder of Jony Ive’s AI hardware company, io, for a total $6.4 billion, as per reporting by CNBC. The news site clarifies that since OpenAI already owned 23% of io, it paid $5 billion in order to bring the total expenditure to $6.4 billion. Ive will remain with the company.

Ive’s specialty is in designing hardware, and so it’ll be interesting to see what OpenAI has planned up its sleeve.

who are these people?

Well, Sam Altman is the CEO of OpenAI, which counts ChatGPT as its halo product. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

Altman called Jony Ive the “greatest designer in the world” in a May 21, 2025 post on X, which seems fair, given that Ive had a hand in nearly all the breakout hits that Apple has built over the past few decades.

He joined Apple in 1992, and yet it was truly the period from the 2000s until he left Apple in 2019 that became known as the Ive Era. Even today, his influence across Apple’s hardware lineup is intense.

“This is an extraordinary moment,” said a press statement released by OpenAI on May 21, the day the deal was announced to the public. “Computers are now seeing, thinking and understanding.

“Despite this unprecedented capability, our experience remains shaped by traditional products and interfaces. Two years ago, Jony Ive and the creative collective LoveFrom, quietly began collaborating with Sam Altman and the team at OpenAI.”

Just take a look at that URL in the statement. It reads “https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/”. I can’t help but feel like this is a tech buyout angling for a TV deal as an ’80s sitcom. “Oh, look at that Sam & Jony on tonight’s episode of Sam & Jony,” you’d say. “They’re feuding, and now they’ve divided their shared apartment right down the middle!”

And then they’d get a walk-on guest star in the form of Sam Bankman-Fried, who’d actually be just a face on an iPad that gets carried around because Fried is in prison.

“I am reminded of a time, three decades ago, when I emigrated to America,” says a quote on the website attributed to Ive. “As a designer, I was drawn to the exhilarating and innocent optimism of Silicon Valley, to collaborate with people driven to create amazing products that elevate humanity.”

I hope Ive has been paying attention to the popular reaction to generative AI technologies, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, because alongside the wide-eyed amazement at its capabilities, there’s also a lot of well justified hand-wringing.