A look at Jony Ive's work with LoveFrom; Ive bought a city block in SF's Jackson Square and could raise ~$1B with Sam Altman by end of 2024 for an AI device
Many people have wondered what Jony Ive has been up to since he left Apple five years ago.Carolyn Fong for The New York Times
Context & Ripple Effects
Ive’s post-Apple vehicle, LoveFrom, was established after he left Apple to start the creative firm with Apple as its first client. Reporting earlier in 2024 had already placed Ive and Altman in funding talks for an AI-device startup, making the reported target an escalation from exploratory financing to a potentially large hardware effort.
The story also connects a design-led venture to dedicated physical space in Jackson Square. Later coverage indicates the project’s ownership path ultimately became more tightly connected to OpenAI through its acquisition of io, though that outcome was not established by this report.
First-order effects
- A potential roughly $1 billion raise would give Ive and Altman the resources to move an AI-device concept beyond design and fundraising conversations toward product development, if the financing closes.
- LoveFrom’s role becomes more consequential: Ive’s design practice is positioned as a core contributor to a prospective AI-hardware venture rather than solely an independent consultancy.
Second-order effects
- A well-capitalized Ive-Altman effort would raise the bar for AI-device startups, which would need to differentiate against a team combining prominent product-design credentials with access to major AI leadership.
- The project would pull attention—and potentially specialist talent and partners—toward standalone AI hardware, rather than treating AI primarily as a feature inside established consumer devices.
Third-order effects
- If AI labs increasingly pair model development with dedicated device teams, consumer access to AI could become a hardware-and-software competition rather than a contest confined to apps and cloud services.
- The eventual consolidation described in later coverage suggests a possible structural pattern: early independent AI-hardware experiments may be absorbed into the platforms that control the underlying AI systems, although this report alone does not establish that as inevitable.
The trend: This is one data point in the push by AI leaders to create purpose-built consumer hardware that can shape how users access their models.