OpenAI Steals Apple's Playbook, Apple's Designer, and Gets Into the ChatGPT Device Wars

Seriously Sam Altman cannot go more than 2 days without trying to grab the news cycle. This week was supposed to be about Google, Microsoft, Anthropic—anyone but OpenAI. I wrote about it here. And until Wednesday we were roughly on track. Microsoft had a big keynote on Monday. Google went Tuesday (and Wednesday). Microsoft is continuing during the week. Anthropic is set to go Thursday.

But then Wednesday morning OpenAI interrupted everything by very publicly announcing that the most famous designer on the planet had permanently joined OpenAI in a massive all-stock deal valued at $6.5B, with the responsibility to build a rumored iPhone killer.

And Jony is a big deal! He’s the spiritual protege of Steve Jobs. He gets credit for being the design mind behind Apple’s hardware. He was on stage recently talking about the value of design as the language of the future with Stripe. He is also someone I personally respect very highly—and regardless of how this deal pans out my personal regard for his legacy isn’t going to change.

And now Sir Jony has been charged with designing the future of our world with AI. And he and Sam Altman are thinking that big and bold about all of this. Read on for a much deeper dive on the deal. How this impacts us, what scaling up device supply chain looks like, how this shapes the race with Apple and Google—and how this ties into that other exec hire from OpenAI last week. Lots to dig into!