EDIT: Sorry, Substack ate the original video; I’ve re-recorded and uploaded another, but I’ve had more caffeine and am probably even less coherent in this one!
You can blame my friend Linda for this. After I posted my cockamamie, hare-brained, paranoid theory that OpenAI bought Jony’s Ive’s studio to set up an eventual acquisition of OpenAI by Apple, she said I had to post it. But such insanity doesn’t merit a full essay, so I just ranted about it in the above video.
For those who prefer text, here’s a summary:
OpenAI has nearly the same likelihood of producing sustainably differentiated hardware that succeeds in the market that Humane did in the very same space: none. What matters for consumer computational hardware are things like
miniaturization
materials science and sourcing power
chip design and manufacturing (long lead times for this)
integration of these and integration into existing markets, developer communities, etc.
battery technology
distribution, physical and online
et cetera ad infinitum
These are all real things that cost huge amounts of money to get good at, to lock in supply chains for, to have IP around, etc. It is not a matter of “getting a great team together,” for example; you also need to have spent years, decades, financing the construction of new factories and machines in exchange for exclusive production runs, or working around complex international political situations!
Anything Humane got right —which turned out to be almost nothing, but imagine a counterfactual— Apple (and Samsung and others) could quickly produce a faster, better, cheaper, more widely-available version of, one that worked with everything they already sell. Nothing about Jony Ive now being the man promising a “reimagined” computer changes that. He and his team may be able to design and produce something gorgeous and nifty, but they have no way of defending it from fast-following, from the execution advantages that often go to those who wait for categories to develop (as Apple usually does!), from Apple’s ludicrous dominance in consumer computational hardware. Many, many companies with more money and talent and need have tried to outcompete Apple in hardware; no one has come close to doing so at scale, and I can’t imagine these two think they will.
I suspect the investors don’t think that’s the play, either. It simply doesn’t make sense on its face. OpenAI, which is already in serious jeopardy of being unable to sustain differentiation / margins in software (as open source and other companies come for them), would be deranged to try and pivot to hardware, an even harder market with usually worse margins. Apple sustains margins in hardware as an exception to the norm; it’s not a model that anyone can copy, and reflects integration of various activities Apple has been engaged in for decades which all compound. Ask Microsoft how easy it’s been to achieve similar outcomes!
So: I think the real play here is suggested by the actual branding and content OpenAI released, extremely heavy on Sam and Jony, as though the real campaign is to aggregate their respective status in their fields; the first words of the site’s header are their names! The deranged photo was probably selected to ensure memorability and public reaction, to establish this pairing: the great product visionary and the legendary designer, “reinventing computing.”
They’re unlikely to reinvent any product category on their own. But if dissatisfaction with Apple continues to increase and if Altman is as good at maneuver as Paul Graham says, they might reinvent Apple’s C-Suite, get a good return on investment for OpenAI’s investors —one otherwise perhaps impossible— and achieve what most people in the Valley really want anyway: a kind of world-historical importance (such as it is) and the highest status possible in this industry, Jobs-tier. Tim Cook can “retire”; OpenAI can get Apple out of the LLM debacle zone they’re in; Jony can avenge himself and run Apple design again; and everyone goes home rich and happy.
(I know this is overheated paranoia; so be it!).
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