Produced by Tiger Sniff Technology Group
Author: Qi Jian
Editor|Wang Yipeng
Header image: Visual China
The mysterious company founded by former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has recently been rumored to have new funding news. There is speculation that the company is building the "iPhone of artificial intelligence".
According to foreign media The Information, a person involved in the company and another person familiar with the company's latest funding revealed that the startup is discussing the latest financing deal with the Emerson Foundation and Thrive Capital.
The Emerson Foundation, founded by Jobs' widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, was close to Ive and Altman. Another investment firm, Xingsheng Capital, is a major investor in OpenAI, and Thrive recently spearheaded the purchase of up to $1 billion worth of OpenAI shares, including shares from employees, which valued the company at $86 billion. A year ago, Thrive bought a large amount of OpenAI stock for about $27 billion.
左起：Jony Ive，Laurene Powell Jobs，Tim Cook 图源|Getty Images
According to another person involved in the process, Ive hopes to raise up to $1 billion in fundraising.
The "AI iPhone" may be the first product of Ive's old club Apple after it became its own portal. For Altman, though, the new company is just one of a series of "dazzling" projects he's working on with OpenAI as a backdrop.
"A new product is not a mobile phone"
While the company's product is widely thought to be an "AI-powered iPhone," some people involved in discussions about Ive-Altman's new company say the AI device doesn't look like a phone.
Since the global heating up of large language models, a number of hardware products focusing on "integrated AI" have emerged in the hardware device market, including AI mobile phones, AIPCs, and various wearable innovative devices.
AI innovation devices are the main battleground for startups, including the AI Pin, a wearable device designed by Humane, and the Rabbit r1, a device designed by Rabbit, which provides cross-app access services. Altman is also one of Humane's major investors.
Ai Pin, a wearable device designed by Humane
The Rabbit r1 is a device designed by Rabbit
"Non-mobile phone" AI innovation devices have received a lot of attention from the market, with data from analytics firm Statista showing that about 50,000 units of the first five batches of the Rabbitr1 launched in January 2024 have been sold. The sixth batch is now available for pre-order in quantities of 50,000 pieces. Humane is also very confident in the sales of the AI Pin, with the first batch of 100,000 units produced.
For a while, AI-blessed devices seem to be out of the shadow of traditional devices. The form of AIPC may not be a PC, and the AI phone does not look like a mobile phone.
However, there are still many challenges for innovative AI devices to replace traditional mobile phones and computers.
Humane's Ai Pin has been criticized by many users for "there should be a screen", and although the Ai Pin provides a laser display that can be projected onto the palm of the hand, the practicality and responsiveness of these features are not perfect. In addition, some users said that it was difficult to adapt to the activation of the trigger word + touch.
Many industry insiders also have reservations about the popularity of innovative AI devices in the consumer market, with a Silicon Valley investor telling Tiger Sniff, "Most AI devices are not particularly innovative compared to traditional mobile phone peripherals." This AI assistant can be replaced with an app on your phone. ”
At its core, AI Pin runs on a proprietary operating system called Cosmos, which enables environmental and situational understanding and leverages AI to streamline the execution of routine tasks, such as summarizing emails, translating languages, answering and making phone calls, and identifying surrounding objects, such as food nutrition labels.
Rabbit r1 uses voice commands and complex actions to remotely operate the app and answer questions, just like a conversation with ChatGPT. Compared with mobile phones, this product has hardly made any upgrades, and it is still the original screen + voice interaction mode.
At the same time, the price of these AI devices is not affordable. The price of the AI Pin is $699 (about 5,000 yuan), and the current price of the iPhone 15 in China starts at 5,999 yuan. The price of the device is not friendly to the average user, and its monthly subscription costs as much as $24, and OpenAI's ChatGPT is priced at $20 per month.
Compared to smartphones + AI applications, the cost of buying AI devices alone does not seem to be very worthwhile. Samsung's first AI phone, the Galaxy S24, starts at $799.99, and the domestic AI company Facing Wall Smart trains a 2 billion parameter model for the phone, and it can even run on a thousand-yuan machine. Zeng Guoyang, CTO of Facewall Intelligence, said to Tiger Sniff: For AI devices, mobile phones are still more acceptable in the short term.
Innovative AI-based interactions
While innovative AI devices aren't as powerful as smartphones, that's actually their biggest selling point.
"Let users stay away from the screen as much as possible through artificial intelligence", innovative AI equipment companies will label their products with the high-end label of "quitting mobile phones".
The aforementioned AI Pin and Rabbit are trying innovative ways to interact with each other to simplify the user's interaction and operation with the touch screen through voice input and projection display. According to Rabbit, the Rabbit r1 is designed to simplify user interaction with technology and reduce reliance on mobile phone screens.
The AI Pin displays a projection on the palm of the hand
In a 2018 interview with the Financial Times, Ive said Apple had a "moral responsibility" to mitigate the addiction of its technology and that tech companies should try and anticipate as many unintended consequences as possible when designing new products.
As a result, the new product jointly launched by Ive-Altman may also be an innovative way to interact.
Embedding large language models in personal portable devices does provide the possibility to reduce mobile phone screen dependence, but to innovate the way of interaction, hardware technology needs to be upgraded. An industry insider told Tiger Sniff that the innovation of interaction is nothing more than turning the screen into projection or glasses, and the touch screen into voice or gestures. AI devices optimize the way of interaction, and the ultimate thing is to focus on the scene.
Judging from the cooperation with other companies that OpenAI has announced, most of the AI empowerment of large language models for other products is based on API forms. For smart hardware, it is likely that only cloud services will be provided in the short term. Therefore, if Ive-Altman launches an AI device based on OpenAI technology, its core functions are likely to still rely on OpenAI's cloud services, and cannot be applied to end-of-device AI products that require offline or rapid response.
"You can use a large model with a mobile phone to access the Internet, and if you make a separate device, it has high requirements for the scene. Yin Zhi, chief consultant of the Shanghai Association for Artificial Intelligence, believes that at present, only data localization is a strong motivation for terminal large language models. Making an innovative device specifically for AI may face serious marketization problems.
True AI device innovation lies in using its own computing power to process and respond to tasks, rather than relying solely on the network. The development of autonomous processing capabilities of end devices, such as local voice processing and image recognition, will provide users with more unique value. With the improvement of edge computing technology, it is expected that AI devices will pay more attention to local intelligent processing, reduce dependence on cloud computing, improve response speed and protect privacy.
Devices that only use terminal computing power face the problem that the computing power will not be too strong, so the question finally becomes whether it can find a model that can be driven by small computing power chips and can have actual application scenarios. Yin Zhi said: "AI terminal equipment should be like a PS handheld, a non-general device for specific scenarios, and a general AI device mobile phone." ”
Startups that can't afford it
The news of Ive-Altman's new company financing is not the first time that the two have collaborated, as some previous reports suggest that OpenAI has begun working with Ive's design company LoveFrom to develop OpenAI's first consumer-grade device, and has begun to discuss the exterior design of this product.
In September 2023, when the Ive-Altman joint venture was first revealed to be discussing plans to build an "AI-powered iPhone," it was reported at the time that the company had received more than $1 billion in funding from SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, who would also push chip designer Arm to play a central role in the plan.
Some investors who did not participate in the company's financing believe that the "Ive-Altman's sign" is too bright, so the company is likely to offer investors a "super high price" from the beginning. However, for a company that does not have any products yet and is on a completely new track, ultra-high financing can be a huge risk.
Compared to Ive-Altman's new company, the other two startups have raised significantly smaller fundings.
Rabbit has raised three rounds of funding in the past few months, including two rounds of about $20 million from OpenAI's first investor, well-known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla, and a multi-million dollar investment from South Korean internet giant Kakao. The total amount of the three financings is about $30 million. Humane currently has a total funding of about $230 million and is valued at about $850 million.
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