Chat, are we back? Again?
OpenAI just paid $6.5 billion to acquire Jony Ive’s startup. The product? Still unclear. The message? Crystal.
A few days ago, I wrote about the industry’s sudden thirst for designers, ending with a question: Can principled design drive profit? Yesterday, that thirst got a price tag: $6.5 billion.
OpenAI announced it was acquiring io, the AI hardware company founded by Sir Jony Ive, in what may be the biggest bet on design-led thinking in tech history. The announcement came with a nine-minute video starring Jony and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walking in soft light through the streets of San Francisco, saying very nice things about one another and very little about what they’re actually building.
What follows is less a take, more an annotated moodboard of what just happened and what it might mean: for designers, for AI, and for those of us trying to navigate the space in between.
The announcement, at a glance
OpenAI is acquiring io, a startup co-founded by Jony Ive, Sam Altman, and longtime Apple design leaders Evans Hankey, Tang Tan, and Scott Cannon
Price tag: $6.5 billion in stock (OpenAI already owned 23%)
Goal: to design a new family of AI-powered hardware devices that moves beyond the current paradigm of screens, keyboards, and apps
Timeline: Maybe next year
As Lauren Goode reported in WIRED, the 55-person io team will report into OpenAI’s VP of Product, Peter Welinder, while LoveFrom will remain an independent design studio. “The amount of care they put into every aspect of the process is extraordinary,” says Sam. The care is clear. The expected outcome is not.
Vibes over vision
Let’s be clear: this was not a product announcement. It was a teaser. Something Apple—especially the Jony and Steve era—never did. Back then, the product came first, philosophy followed. The output spoke for itself. Instead, lines on OpenAI’s microsite read like a eulogy for a product that never existed: “The ideas seemed important and useful. They were optimistic and hopeful. They were inspiring. They made everyone smile.”
The video played like a memorial to meaning itself: golden-hour footage, placeholder typography, disembodied narration about friendship and optimism. There’s also ample speculation on whether aspects of it were AI-generated. Judah notes that the cups on the table kept moving (likely the result of a multi-hour shoot), the extras looked fake, and the bokeh never landed on anything real.
We’re in the golden age of the soft launch. Sometimes the story precedes the strategy. But there’s a risk when the aura outruns the artifact. What happens when the medium mirrors the uncertainty of the message?
Sincerity as strategy
The video’s emotional tone is unmistakable: care, curiosity, optimism. But if the goal was to humanize Sam through proximity to Jony, the effect lands unevenly. As Daniel Kuntz tweets: “Jony is sort of a ‘known morally good person’ saying a lot of very nice things about Sam.” It’s not hard to see why some viewed the video as a reputational halo.
At one point, Jony tees up Sam to talk about improving lives: “The responsibility that Sam bears is actually honestly is beyond my comprehension… but what really struck me is what he’s worrying about is not himself and it’s not his company. What I see you worrying about are other people or about customers, about society, about culture.”
In response, Sam cites productivity metrics: scientists being three times faster, externalized cognition, economic impact.
There’s a kind of energy to the pairing, but the dynamic raises a harder question: is this partnership about design as strategy, or design as PR?
The return of design—or its reincarnation as brand?
In my last post, I wrote about the rise of designer-founders, the resurgence of skeuomorphism, and the growing appetite for products that feel less like software and more like care. Jony was already central to that story. Now he’s back at the center of the industry, and the myth has only grown.
Jony remains a north star for design: taste, integrity, restraint. But there’s a danger in mythologizing a single figure—especially when tech keeps rotating the same icons through new roles. Are we moving forward, or remixing greatest hits?
OK but what are we building
OpenAI says io will design “a new family of products.” In their words, computers are now “seeing, thinking and understanding,” yet our interfaces remain shaped by “legacy products.” Jony, for his part, says he wants to create “amazing products that elevate humanity.” That sounds good. But what does it mean?
The New York Times notes Sam’s growing discomfort with the smartphone: “It feels a lot like being jostled on a crowded street in New York.” (Shots fired?) This seems like his answer. So, ambient computing? Glasses? Something pendant-like? WIRED suggests its form will be consumer-facing, but function TBD. As of today, we don’t know what they’re building. We don’t know who it’s for. And we don’t know what success looks like.
What we do know is that this is the clearest signal yet that OpenAI wants to own the interface, not just the model. The comparison to Humane looms large. That product also promised a more ethical, less screen-bound relationship to tech. It also failed.
Design, narrative, and the gap in between
The most generous reading of the video is that it’s not a launch but an invocation. A statement of intent. In that sense, it’s not unlike the best design: suggestive, incomplete, filled with room for interpretation.
But in a moment when designers are being asked to lead—as founders, as strategists, as stewards of meaning—the question isn’t just whether design can soften technology. It’s whether it can shape it. Whether design can scale, not just speak.
The market is flooded with feelings, but starved for clarity. It’s early. If this is a return to soul, it’ll take more than sincerity to build it. To justify a story this big, you have to ship the product. And not just any product—one that lives up to the sincerity of the pitch.
—Carly
P.S. Shoutout
, on calling this months ago. And thank you, Sebastian, for your deep Apple cuts and feedback on this post.
You have to read Emily Keegin's Instagram stories about the insane photography choices for this announcement while they're still up!
With the amount of Care they are professing towards humanity and each other, it seems odd that the portrait seems to be photoshopped or generated or both.
There’s an argument that how it’s made shouldn’t matter anymore I suppose, but it doesn’t look good and evokes an uncomfortable sense of uncanny valley