OpenAI said it was buying IO, a start-up founded by Mr. Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to usher in a new era of artificial intelligence hardware.

Here’s what we know: it’s probably not smart glasses. Beyond that, we don’t know much about what Jony Ive and OpenAI are building through their newly combined company io, except that it’s some kind of AI super-gadget. But after a couple of years of watching the industry try and shove AI into every form factor you can imagine, we have some guesses.

Hours after Sam Altman and Jony Ive announced on Wednesday that OpenAI was buying Ive’s company, io, in an all-stock transaction valued at $6.5 billion, Investors were happy about the hefty returns they got from the sale of io to OpenAI.

Jony Ive and Sam Altman are teaming up to make AI hardware.They aren't giving too many clues about what it would be like, but probably screen-free, and not a phone.Please, I beg you, Jony and Sam: Do not make me talk to a device in public.

OpenAI is buying io, a hardware company founded by former Apple design chief Jony Ive and several other former engineers from his time there, including Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey, and Tang Tan.

Well-funded and big-name partnerships often end in failure. And ex-Apple employees don’t have a great record of success.

The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week’s I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode.