Designer Jony Ive, best known for his work on everything from the iMac to the iPhone, wanted to quit Apple before Steve Jobs returned as CEO.
Instead, he stuck around at the tech company for nearly three decades and revolutionized consumer electronics. Now, he’s undertaking a new venture and looking to do the same with AI.
As Ive embarks on a new partnership with OpenAI’s Sam Altman, here is a look back at how he rose to be one of the most well known tech designers in the world, with the help of a Silicon Valley icon.
Ive joined Apple in 1992 after he graduated from Newcastle Polytechnic, now Northumbria University, in the U.K. and began his career by starting his own design firm, Tangerine, according to the biography Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson. After Tangerine secured a contract with Apple, Ive moved to Cupertino, California, from London to take a job in the design department, where the young designer quickly moved up the ranks and became head of the department in 1996.
Still, Ive wasn’t happy, and in fact, he was planning to quit. Under then-CEO Gil Amelio, Ive felt the company was focusing too much on profits, and its designers were expected to spit out models for the outside of products, while the engineers made the inside of the products function as cheaply as possible.
This dynamic changed when cofounder Steve Jobs returned in 1997 after being ousted more than a decade prior. In one of his first talks with employees, Isaacson wrote, Ive remembered Jobs specifically saying the company’s mission was “not just to make money but to make great products.” Hearing this message convinced Ive to stick around.
While Jobs first looked outside of Apple for a design partner, he grew fond of Ive for his earnestness during a tour of Apple’s design department, wrote Isaacson.
“We discussed approaches to forms and materials,” Ive told Isaacson. “We were on the same wavelength. I suddenly understood why I loved the company.”
Jobs, for his part, developed a special bond with Ive despite their 12-year age difference, wrote Isaacson. The designer, who was supposed to report to the head of the hardware division, later became a frequent visitor to Jobs’ home and regularly had lunch with the CEO. The often highly critical Jobs even seemed to spare Ive the worst of his outbursts.
“Most people in Steve’s life are replaceable. But not Jony,” Steve Jobs’ widow Laurene Powell Jobs told Isaacson.
Their admiration was mutual. Of Ive, Jobs said to Isaacson: “He gets the big picture as well as the most infinitesimal details about each product. And he understands that Apple is a product company. He’s not just a designer.”
Ive stayed at Apple for nearly a decade following Jobs’ death, and departed the company in 2019 to help start a design firm, LoveFrom.
Two years ago, LoveFrom began working with OpenAI, and a year ago, Ive cofounded io, a startup focused on building AI-native devices.
Now, OpenAI is acquiring io in a $6.5 billion deal announced this past week, with Ive trying to build on his past design success with new AI-native devices.
It’s unclear exactly what position Ive will take at OpenAI. But in a statement signed by both Ive and Altman, the pair said Ive’s LoveFrom will “assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Ive’s team at his startup io has also apparently already started work on an unnamed AI gadget shrouded in secrecy, and Altman is impressed.
“Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home and I’ve been able to live with it, and I think it is the coolest piece that the world will have ever seen,” Altman said during a video announcing the new acquisition.
By teaming up with OpenAI, he may also be joining another dynamic duo, this time with Altman—another influential tech leader, but 28 years his junior.
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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