A year after multiple publications reported Jony Ive was collaborating with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on a hardware project, Ive himself has confirmed it in a profile in the New York Times.
There aren’t a lot of details on the project. Ive reportedly met Altman through Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, and the project is being funded by Ive and the Emerson Collective, Laurene Powell Jobs’ company. The New York Times claims it could raise $1 billion in funding by the end of the year, but makes no mention of Masayoshi Son, the SoftBank CEO rumored last year to have invested $1 billion in the project.
The project only has 10 employees currently, but they include Tang Tan and Evans Hankey, two key people who worked with Ive on the iPhone. As for…