Big News: A New Family of Products for the Age of Artificial Intelligence

©iStock/Lemon_tm

On May 21, 2025, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company was paying $6.5 billion to buy IO, a one-year-old start-up created by Jony Ive, a former top Apple executive who designed the iPhone.  They had already owned 23% of the company and now will own 100%.

The all-stock deal, which effectively unites Silicon Valley royalty, is intended to usher in what the two men call “a new family of products” for the age of artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., which is shorthand for a future technology that achieves human-level intelligence.

The goal of the partnership, or the blending of the two companies, was to leverage A.I. to help people make some sense of the noise.  Which means a new cool device by Ive.  Ive's design studio, LoveFrom remains independent from OpenAI to work on other projects.

Learn more about what is yet to come:  a new generation of devices.