Tang Tanvice president of product design for the iPhone and Apple Watch, is leaving Apple to join the new artificial intelligence project led by Jony Ive and Sam Altman. This is stated in the most recent report by Mark Gurman, of Bloomberg.
The executive will join LoveFrom, Jony Ive’s design company, from February 2024. Once there, he will take charge of leading the hardware engineering team for this new initiative. Thus, the alliance between Apple’s former industrial design leader and the CEO of OpenAI continues to take shape.
An interesting fact that Gurman provides is that, it seems, the new venture will not focus on a single device, but on several. Details in this regard are still scarce, since the initiative is in a very early stage. However, the renowned journalist mentions that the initial concept designs include gadgets for smart home.
Although the first works would be carried out under the wing of LoveFrom, the intention of Jony Ive and Sam Altman would be, eventually, to make them independent under a new company. The involvement of Masayoshi SonCEO of Softbank, who supposedly would have committed an investment of 1,000 million dollars.
Tang Tan’s departure from Apple was announced in early December. However, it will only become effective in February of next year, when he joins the ranks of Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s project. Those from Cupertino moved quickly to divide their responsibilities within the company, which have already fallen to Richard Dinh and Kate Bergeron.
Jony Ive and Sam Altman recruit Apple talent for their AI project
The alliance between Ive and Altman to develop devices powered by artificial intelligence began to be rumored in September. At that time, it was said that the entrepreneurs’ intention was to create “the iPhone of AI.” Although this did not necessarily imply that what they developed was a smartphone, but rather that they intended to design a product that would achieve the same revolutionary impact that the first version of Apple’s mobile phone had.
In October, meanwhile, the CEO of OpenAI provided more details on the matter. And although he avoided mentioning Jony Ive directly, he did hint that they had several ideas in the pipeline and that they should finish shaping them. Yes indeed, ruled out any attempt to compete in the mobile market.
“I think there’s something really cool to do, but I don’t know what it is yet. We have a lot of ideas, but they’re all in a very nascent stage. Smartphones are great, and I have no interest in competing with them. They’re phenomenal at what they do. They do, but what artificial intelligence enables is so fundamentally new that I think it’s worth the effort to talk or think about what we can do now that wasn’t possible before we had computers that could reason or understand. And if the answer is ‘nothing’, then it would be quite disappointing.
Sam Altman, on his collaboration with Jony Ive.
It is evident that the plan to create devices with cutting-edge software and great design It is the big bet of Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s plan. Having added Tang Tan, an Apple legend, only confirms this, even though there is still a lot to know about what they are developing.
For those in Cupertino, meanwhile, the bleeding of executives has become impossible to stop. In addition to the aforementioned Tan, Apple has recently lost Peter Russell-Clarke, one of the last designers who was part of Jony Ive’s team during his time at the company. The aforementioned will become a consultant for a space technology company called Vast. Added to this is the departure of Steve Hotelling, who developed some of the most revolutionary technologies in Apple devices. Such are the cases of the iPhone’s touch screen and the Touch ID system.
According to Gurman, 14 designers who were part of Jony Ive’s team have left Apple since 2019. So there would be no more than 6 who would remain in office within the firm led by Tim Cook.