OpenAI is reportedly in the advanced stages of discussions with renowned former Apple designer Jony Ive to create an “iPhone of artificial intelligence” as part of a $1 billion venture backed by Japanese investment firm SoftBank.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who heads the company behind the AI bot ChatGPT, has been in contact with Ive and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son about partnering up, according to the tech-centric news site The Information.
Ive, 56, the British designer who is viewed as the brains behind iconic products including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad, departed Apple in 2019 to form LoveFrom, an independent design company.
The extent of SoftBank’s involvement in the venture was reported by the Financial Times.
OpenAI and LoveFrom have reportedly been discussing “what new hardware for the age of AI could look like,” according to the report.
The Post has sought comment from OpenAI, SoftBank and Ive.
OpenAI, which released the wildly popular chatbot ChatGPT in November, has been in talks with investors about selling shares in the company at a valuation of between $80 billion and $90 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.
One of those potential investors is SoftBank, the Japanese multinational that has plans to bet big on artificial intelligence.
The company, which has received some $11 billion in funding from Microsoft, has reportedly told investors it expects to generate $1 billion in revenue this year and several billion more next year, The Journal reported.
OpenAI’s meteoric success has ignited an artificial intelligence arms race among Silicon Valley powers including Google, Meta, and Microsoft, which is working on conversational AI technology that will be rolled out independently of OpenAI.
In January, Microsoft invested in OpenAI, which at the time was valued at just under $30 billion.
In 2015, OpenAI was founded as a nonprofit research lab in San Francisco by a team that included Tesla CEO Elon Musk.
Musk, who left OpenAI in 2018 after losing a power struggle, has been critical of the company over its financial ties to Microsoft.
Musk said OpenAI’s popular chatbot had a liberal bias and that he planned an alternative that would be a “maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”
OpenAI said in a blog post earlier this week that ChatGPT will be getting a major update that will enable it to have voice conversations with users and interact using images.
The voice feature “opens doors to many creative and accessibility-focused applications,” according to the company.
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