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OpenAI and Jony Ive in talks to raise $1B from SoftBank for AI device venture
- throwaway290 3y agoThis collection of names does not inspire confidence, with all due respect to sir Jony for past accomplishments...
- jack_riminton 3y ago$1Bn pre launch funding + Softbank = not a good omen
- Workaccount2 3y agoI don't know much about softbank, but my brain strongly associates them with bad bets, failure, and losing money.
- yamakadi 3y agoAdd to that weak cell coverage, exorbitant fees, and a privacy nightmare of jumbled up offerings (Yahoo! Japan, PayPay, Line, Telecom, ISP services, etc.), and you get the full picture. SoftBank is originally one of the big 3 telecom providers in Japan. We do joke around here about our phone bills increasing anytime Masayoshi Son makes a bad investment.
- jack_riminton 3y agoToo much money skews everything in product development There's a reason why the iphone team was so small (https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/27/apple_employee_reveals_the_inner_workings_shockingly_small_iphone_dev_team/ https://www.theregister.com/2014/03/27/apple_employee_reveal...) you need to be ruthlessly focussed and not pressurised by outside investors or managers who don't know what they're talking about (Softbank) I'm not sure what the money would be spent on at OpenAI. Maybe they will keep it small, and hyper-focussed. But I worked in VC for a while and VC money was described to me as rocket fuel, you don't want to go dousing it on things before the rocket is built because it stinks and has a tendency to blow things up
- EFreethought 3y agoThey invested in Alibaba about 20 years ago, made something like 2000x their investment ($20M to $50B), and have been wrong about everything since. They were an early investor in WeWork, and paid Adam Neumann to go away instead of throwing him out head first.
- kirubakaran 3y agoYesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37681663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37681663
- dosplatos 3y agoThanks for the non-paywalled article
- pc_edwin 3y agoThe interesting thing is they have the bankroll to actually make this work and it actually makes a lot of sense. I remember watching a Google I/O presentation back in 2016 when voice assistants were trending. There was all sorts of ideas like APIs to access google assistant, voice/chat being the new interface etc. The future presented there made so much intuitive sense to me and now the tech has finally caught up. The current static state off affairs has clearly outlived its usefulness. Its not all sunshine and roses, Apple is an order of magnitude better position to take this leap then OpenAI. I know this may be a little out there but I think Apple made the right move by not jumping the gun with LLMs, IMO it makes more to let the dust settle and either partner with one of the winners or pick up the open standard (Llama 5?)
- icyfox 3y agoThere was an Information article a few weeks ago on Apple increasing its daily spend to millions of dollars in ML training costs per day. With their historic desire for control over the whole stack, I'd put money on them rolling their own architecture.
- pc_edwin 3y agoThats a start but if they were really going for it, it would look more like a multi-billion dollar investment with M&A, head hunting, training infra, partnerships etc Atm its looks more like getting they lay of the land, which IMO is the smart move.
- Karunamon 3y agoIf they take that leap. Apple was pretty early to the voice assistant game but they have been content to never actually do anything interesting with it. Siri is easily the worst mainstream product in its category, it has always baffled me how long they let this be the case.
- lancesells 3y agoSome of that makes sense. The three companies with the biggest voice assistants are Apple, Amazon, and Google. What are they all getting out of it? Google gets more data which is what they want. Amazon gets something, maybe knowing more about you, maybe some small margin of orders. Apple does things on-device so they get? I'm not saying I like that Siri is terrible. I'm a Siri/Homepod user and somehow it seems worse each year, but possibly Apple sees little upside to Siri compared to adding a programmable button to the iPhone.
- tikkun 3y agoFor hardware devices that raised >$100mm before launch, how have they gone? Successes: * Tesla Non-successes: * Magic Leap * Juicero * Nuro * Segway What else am I missing? I suspect there are other successes that raised >$100mm pre-launch that I'm not thinking of. I wonder why they wouldn't start smaller. That said, I still expect they'll succeed, and I hope they succeed. I don't believe in any rules of thumb, great startups always defy the odds.
- alsodumb 3y agoA bunch of VTOL/eVTOL and space startups also probably raised >100$ pre-launch I guess? Skydio raised way more than 100 million and I'd call them success, although I'm not sure if they raised that much pre-launch.
- mdonahoe 3y agoWe raised ~$60m before R1 launched in 2018. And we were still under 100 total when S2 launched at the end of 2019. I'm not sure how things would have played out if we had 100m+ before we launched anything. We may have delayed launch even further and missed out on valuable market feedback and brand awareness.
- dkyc 3y agoAccording to public sources Tesla has raised 'only' 60.5m before delivering the first roadsters in February 2008. Though that total increased to 100.5m by the summer of that year. But I get your point. [0]: https://www.startupranking.com/startup/tesla/funding-rounds https://www.startupranking.com/startup/tesla/funding-rounds
- brucethemoose2 3y agoThe original roadster was a Lotus Elise with laptop batteries. It was essentially a prototype, albeit a production prototype.
- mushufasa 3y ago
- garrettjoecox 3y agoSomething something razor thin aluminium. On a serious note, I wonder if Altman will be able to control Ive’s obsession with form over function like Jobs did.
- whalesalad 3y agoelegantly chamfered* aluminum
- EFreethought 3y agoDon't forget rounded corners.
- some1else 3y agoMan, I can't even begin to imagine what they're going to come up with. Titanium AIPods. Non-detachable alluminum RayBans. Google Glass, but it's a literal Black Mirror worn on your face. Self-driving Segway. Transparent plastic smart lunchbox. Electric long-board that's also a tablet. Fist-mountable selfdefense impact jackhammer. 5G base station Zurb ball. A keyboard that starts repeating nnnn when you think of what you want to type. Neuralink, but for discreetly listening to major record label IP. Contact lens payment system where you wink to tip your landlord. Quantified shelf. A car without a steering wheel, made entirely out of Corning glass. Heelies that auto-reverse when they sense an oncoming homeless person. Van-life, but it's a sentient executive jet plane. Longevity device that puts you to sleep for at least 8 hours every day. Intimacy fit-ring. Schedulable dopamine-inhibiting nanobots? This could be huge.
- gruturo 3y agoIf you're this good when trolling for 5 minutes, I would be amazed to see you work seriously. Honestly some of those ideas are... terrible, of course, but awesome in their own distorted way. And also very Ive-like. Bravo, sir.
- drvdevd 3y agoI need a self driving Segway, yesterday.
- some1else 3y agoShould be able to avoid cliffs without a radar. You can always add it back later anyway.
- hef19898 3y agoJust imagine a Ive-designed retina-scanning-orb! Easily worth a billion to SoftBank, easily!
- lancesells 3y ago
- ramesh31 3y agoSomething I've thought about for the past year, we can totally have real life PokeDexes now. It's all there; vision, voice, and reasoning. Just needs to be packaged with enough hardware to power local models, which smartphones aren't quite there yet. I want one.
- davefol 3y agoThe app is called seek and it works very well with local models. https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/seek_app
- ftxbro 3y agoThey are designing the Niemann AI chess beads but for real this time.
- brap 3y agoWhat the hell is an "AI device"? Unless we're talking robotics, I don't see why you would need a separate device for AI. Seems like we already have all the right form factors (phones, speakers, etc). This reminds me of when Facebook tried to make a Facebook phone. Turned out iPhones and Androids were significantly better as phones and they could do Facebook just fine.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> What the hell is an "AI device"? Puck and a pair of AirPods? (Maybe compute in the case?) A device optimised to run a set of LLMs and not sacrifice battery for e.g. a screen seems like it would have a niche, if it just worked. Picture the AIs profiled in the later series of Westworld.
- mlnj 3y agoWould it not make more sense to use OpenAI LLMs to be hosted away from these device. It would also align with Jony Ive's focus on design over everything else. Yet another data consumption device?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> Would it not make more sense to use OpenAI LLMs to be hosted away from these device The lag is annoying. I don’t remember Ive’s position on privacy, but shipping everything off to the cloud isn’t great for that. There might be satisfaction in having a childlike AI running on device who can call grandma—or whatever-when it needs help. One could tune it to different levels of spontaneity (“that’s a Magpie, in case you’re interested”) and proactiveness (“I noticed a new restaurant nearby and you haven’t eaten all day, so I grabbed a placeholder reservation”) that shouldn’t require a lot of phoning home to the mothership.
- f6v 3y agoThere was this device in Neeuromancer. Like a small stone, you touch it and can talk to AI in your head. That’d be awesome.
- martinclayton 3y agohttps://archive.ph/LOd6K https://archive.ph/LOd6K
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37681663 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37681663
- rqtwteye 3y agoI am sure it will be very thin…. I still remember when everybody suddenly added “COM” or “NET” to product and company names during the .COM bubble. Same with “AI” today. Good PR but ultimately meaningless.
- boeingUH60 3y agoThis is a ploy to extract money from Masayoshi Son, the biggest fad chaser on the block.
- passwordoops 3y agoWait, SoftBank might still have one billion after all their bad bets and failures?! I'm at a complete loss of words... seriously at this point just seize the money and hand it out at random. That outcome is sure to be better and more productive than anything SB has done or will do
- huytersd 3y agoARM, ByteDance, Compass etc. they’re making a killing even after all those losses.
- nottorp 3y agoSoftbank again? Another WeWork? Never mind, the device will be thin and will break in 2 weeks if you dare use it outside a temperature controlled clean room.
- typingonmyphone 3y agoI can’t help but wonder if Ive feels responsible for smartphone addiction. And if he hopes he might reshape our relationship to screens by introducing a new way to interact with technology. And if, at the end of the day, he might just create a new, deeper addiction.
- adhocmobility 3y agoThe answer to what they're building is written on Karpathy's twitter - "A kind of Jarvis"
- CptFribble 3y agoDoes this signal that OpenAI is seeing the limits of their own technology being hit just around the corner? There is already no shortage of investment and hype around their core product - but it definitely does not seem like something you'd want to cram into a physical product, and definitely definitely not something you'd need $1B to develop. This smells like "Open"AI is on-ramping to the final stage, cashout. 1. Raise $1B for a device blessed with Ive cool-factor for maximum hype and sales 2. Launch this device for $999 ($1299?) 3. Record-breaking IPO shortly after 4. ??? 5. Everyone realizes they don't really need a $1k device to tell them "As an AI language model, I can't answer that question" fifteen times per day
- nickfromseattle 3y agoA device that is 1000x better than Siri + Alexa + Cortona could be worth tens of billions of dollars a year in revenue. Revenue that OpenAi can use to fund UBI. Someone will build this device, might as well be OpenAi (+ Jony Ive).
- mvdtnz 3y agoWhen SoftBank is in you know it's time to get out.