What can we expect from Jony Ive-OpenAI partnership?

The direction these products will take falls tantalizingly beyond speculation, yet when we look at Ive’s career trajectory and, in general, the power of placing a designer at the heart of a business, it’s easy to see why the news amounts to something.

What’s happened?

Jony Ive’s enigmatic design consultancy LoveFrom has been working with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman since 2023. In 2024, Ive then founded IO with former Apple designers and engineers Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Ten. IO worked closely with OpenAI around a brief to help it develop a new family of products. Blended teams of hardware and software engineers were set up alongside technologists, physicists, other scientists and researchers, as well as product development and manufacturing experts.

IO has now been formerly acquired by OpenAI to the tune of $6.4bn and, following this, Ive and LoveFrom will assume what has been oddly phrased as “deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and IO.”

Staged but significant

All of this was communicated in a very odd statement, which ran with a very odd photo and a very odd and rather choreographed video, which seemed to celebrate the bubble of San Francisco, which in Altman’s eyes holds “a mythical place in American history and maybe even world history.” In the grandest of terms, he also claimed that what is to come is “the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen” and “the greatest technological revolution of our lifetime.”

It’s best not to get drawn into this hyperbole, though, and instead take external perspectives, as when we do, we see that the ingredients for transformative consumer products – and maybe even B2B products – are still potentially there.

The most interesting part of the announcement is that a lot of work has already been done. Ive refers to computers and phones as “legacy products” in relation to how they facilitate OpenAI products (think about the physical gestures that are familiar to browsers, typing, keyboards and screens). It follows that “a family of devices will be created,” according to Altman, who promises that these will “reimagine what it means to use a computer.” Ive is designing these products.

There’s a very separate conversation to be had around ethics, although it is telling that Ive says in the promo video: “The responsibility that Sam bears is actually beyond comprehension.” However, Ive also says: “Our motivations and values are completely the same.”

Working with Jony Ive

“John is an unusual blend of visionary thinker and master craftsman,” says Tangerine co-founder Martin Darbyshire, who is one of the people who brought Ive into the business in 1990. “You could even use the word pedantic in terms of the level of detail he will design something with and, at the same time, he can think a long way ahead, in many ways, but he’s also a gentle and very humble soul, so he’s quite a complex character.”

Working closely alongside him from 1990 to 1992, Darbyshire could see Ive was “a phenomenal design talent. There’s no question about that. He could do things years ahead of what you would expect someone who had just graduated could do.”

Towards the end of 1992, he had joined Apple, a company that was also one of Tangerine’s clients. Ive and Darbyshire worked together on a concept project for Apple called Juggernaut.

Darbyshire says: “We were looking at the future of portable computers. Apple had the Newton Pad, which used a pen and a sort of very early handwriting recognition, so as well as having a small keyboard on a screen and a pen, it was also the introduction of a tablet, if you like, but it was a lumpy device that you held in your hand. It wasn’t small.”

Tangerine developed three concepts to improve upon this (see banner image). “There was the Workspace, which was a kind of desktop but portable computer, Sketch Pad, which folded up into a clutch bag, and then Folio, which was a suite of separate elements comprising a screen with a stand and then wireless keyboard and a pen,” says Darbyshire, who adds: “It was the beginning of what the iPad might be, but early thinking in that respect.”

This was the end of Ive’s brief but formative time at Tangerine. “Through the success of that project John, was tempted to go to Apple. It wanted to recruit him and we said, ‘Go, it’s a great opportunity.’”

Without getting too bogged down in Ive’s Apple career, it is worth remembering that he was heavily, personally involved in the design outcomes of the iPod, iPhone and iPad.

How much difference can one designer make?

While Ive’s talent shouldn’t be ignored, neither should we be swept up in lauding his genius when a lot of his success at Apple came down to its structure: namely, placing design at the heart of the business where it was backed by the company’s CEO.

Whether you credit Ive himself or the way Apple was set up with the success of category defining and revolutionary products, there are obvious parallels to be drawn with the faith Ive has been shown by OpenAI, so it’s not such a stretch to think about the impact this suite of OpenAI products might have.

Darbyshire is still cautious with his assessment of Ive’s power. “John is a phenomenally talented designer, but he’s only been able to do what he did at Apple because he was fundamentally empowered by a CEO [Steve Jobs] who believed in design. Without that backing, design will always struggle to deliver what it can.”

The alternative would be a “company that market researches everything to death, has a consensus viewpoint on things and looks for what they think will please everyone because they believe that’s the safest path,” he says.

The $7tn question

There’s also the matter of the inconceivable amounts of money sloshing around at OpenAI, which isn’t profitable at the moment and nor is it expected to be so until 2029, according to Bloomberg.

Meanwhile, Altman aims to raise $7tn, as the Guardian reports as part of an interview with tech journalist Karen Hao, who told the newspaper: “When he [Altman] is talking to someone, what comes out of his mouth is not necessarily correlated as much with his own beliefs as it is with what he thinks the other person needs to hear.” This rather explains his knack for fundraising.

The sums of money being raised are, according to Hao, “a threat to democracy” and she warns that this is the real danger of AI, rather than other visions of apocalypse. She told The Guardian that OpenAI “raised $40bn in the last round” and having control of that amount of money “is in and of itself a threat.”

Without pointing specifically at OpenAI, Darbyshire raises another point around profitability. “The success of a business is down to the way it operates, its culture and also the business model that it develops to ensure it makes money, because there are plenty of device-oriented businesses that have got nowhere and ran out of money because they didn’t have a sustainable income stream.”

Following a recording at an OpenAI meeting being passed to the Wall Street Journal, the product is understood to be “aware of a user’s surroundings and life, will be unobtrusive, able to rest in one’s pocket or on one’s desk,” yet be quite separate to a user’s phone or laptop.

Exceptional products still need services and infrastructure

“What’s always difficult with products is how you monetize them,” says Darbyshire, who adds: “It depends on whether they’re trying to be a business that is profit driven and, unless they have a robust subscription model of some sort, devices are difficult to make money with.

“If you look at Fitbit, it hasn’t made a profit since 2015, despite being owned by Google, and there are many more failures than successes on this front, so this is what intrigues me.”

While it’s likely that OpenAI will be banking on a mass-use consumer product, Darbyshire says it would be interesting if OpenAI “looked at healthcare or the B2B market, but that would be quite a shift away from the lifestyle products John is associated with to some degree.”

Depending on where you look, you can see that, on average, OpenAI is generally valued at around $300bn, yet its 2025 revenue was $12.5bn. “The way these companies get valued really puzzles me,” says Darbyshire.

There does seem to be brand value in OpenAI, though. Kantar has placed OpenAI’s Chat GPT at 60 in its world’s most valuable global brands survey, BrandZ 2025. The brand’s perception as meaningful, different, salient, convenient, purposeful and disruptive has got it there, according to Kantar

So, without speculating too wildly, we can see that Jony Ive has a proven track record for designing products that offer new ways to interface with technology, yet this has only been enabled where his teams were able to design radically and were supported as a core business function. History also tells us that with no service design mechanism for support (like a popular subscription service), products alone will not lead to business success. But the public is clearly very into ChatGPT and its slightly mysterious parent company.