OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is on a quest to build an AI-first device that he says will be as revolutionary as the iPhone but will bring users peace and calm instead of more stress. He even got Jony Ive, the designer of the original iPhone, to help build it.
There was an earlier prototype that we were quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of, 'I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out of it,' and then finally we got there all of a sudden.
The world before Jony Ive was beige. Not metaphorically. Literally beige. Computers in the 1990s came in one color: the pale, institutional tan of filing cabinets and government offices. They squatted under desks like appliances. Humming, hot, hostile. Thick cables snaked across floors. Fans whirred. Monitors flickered with the sickly glow of cathode rays. The interface was a command line: green text on black, cryptic strings of code that demanded fluency before granting access.