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WIRED
6 days ago
- Science
- WIRED
The Mysterious Inner Workings of Io, Jupiter's Volcanic Moon
Jun 15, 2025 7:00 AM Recent flybys of the fiery world refute a leading theory of its inner structure—and reveal how little is understood about geologically active moons. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/ASI/INAF/JIRAM The original version of this story appeared in Quanta Magazine. Scott Bolton's first encounter with Io took place in the summer of 1980, right after he graduated from college and started a job at NASA. The Voyager 1 spacecraft had flown past this moon of Jupiter, catching the first glimpse of active volcanism on a world other than Earth. Umbrella-shaped outbursts of magmatic matter rocketed into space from all over Io's surface. 'They looked amazingly beautiful,' said Bolton, who is now based at the Southwest Research Institute in Texas. 'It was like an artist drew it. I was amazed at how exotic it looked compared to our moon.' Scientists like Bolton have been trying to understand Io's exuberant volcanism ever since. A leading theory has been that just below the moon's crust hides a global magma ocean, a vast contiguous cache of liquid rock. This theory dovetails neatly with several observations, including ones showing a roughly uniform distribution of Io's volcanoes, which seem to be tapping the same omnipresent, hellish source of melt. But now, it appears that Io's hell has vanished—or rather, it was never there to begin with. During recent flybys of the volcanic moon by NASA's Juno spacecraft, scientists measured Io's gravitational effect on Juno, using the spacecraft's tiniest wobbles to determine the moon's mass distribution and therefore its internal structure. The scientists reported in Nature that nothing significant is sloshing about just beneath Io's crust. 'There is no shallow ocean,' said Bolton, who leads the Juno mission. Independent scientists can find no fault with the study. 'The results and the work are totally solid and pretty convincing,' said Katherine de Kleer, a planetary scientist at the California Institute of Technology. The data has reopened a mystery that spills over into other rocky worlds. Io's volcanism is powered by a gravity-driven mechanism called tidal heating, which melts the rock into magma that erupts from the surface. Whereas Io is the poster child for this mechanism, tidal heating also heats many other worlds, including Io's neighbor, the icy moon Europa, where the heat is thought to sustain a subterranean saltwater ocean. NASA launched the $5 billion Clipper spacecraft to search Europa's sky for signs of life in the proposed underground ocean. A map of Io's surface, created with images from the Voyager 1 and Galileo missions, shows the wide distribution of the moon's volcanoes. The large red ring is sulfurous fallout from the plume of the Pele volcano. Photograph: US Geological Survey But if Io doesn't have a magma ocean, what might that mean for Europa? And, scientists now wonder, how does tidal heating even work? Melting Magma Heat drives geology, the rocky foundation upon which everything else, from volcanic activity and atmospheric chemistry to biology, is built. Heat often comes from a planet's formation and the decay of its radioactive elements. But smaller celestial objects like moons have only tiny reserves of such elements and of residual heat, and when those reserves run dry, their geological activity flatlines. Or, at least, it should—but something appears to grant geologic life to small orbs throughout the solar system long after they should have geologically perished. Io is the most flamboyant member of this puzzling club—a burnt-orange, crimson, and tawny Jackson Pollock painting. The discovery of its over-spilling cauldrons of lava is one of the most famous tales in planetary science, as they were predicted to exist before they were discovered. NASA's Voyager 1 probe photographed Io in 1979, revealing the first glimpse of volcanism beyond Earth. In this photo mosaic, a lava plume is seen emanating from Loki Patera, now known to be the moon's largest volcano. Photograph: NASA/JPL/USGS On March 2, 1979, a paper in Science ruminated on Io's strange orbit. Because of the positions and orbits of neighboring moons, Io's orbit is elliptical rather than circular. And when Io is closer to Jupiter, it experiences a stronger gravitational pull from the gas giant than when it is farther away. The study authors figured that Jupiter's gravity must therefore be constantly kneading Io, pulling its surface up and down by up to 100 meters, and, per their calculations, generating a lot of frictional heat within it—a mechanism they described as 'tidal heating.' They conjectured that Io may be the most intensely heated rocky body in the solar system. 'One might speculate that widespread and recurrent surface volcanism would occur,' they wrote. Just three days later, Voyager 1 flew by. An image taken on March 8 documented two gigantic plumes arching above its surface. After ruling out all other causes, NASA scientists concluded that Voyager had seen an alien world's volcanic eruptions. They reported their discovery in Science that June, just three months after the prediction. The planetary science community quickly coalesced around the idea that tidal heating within Io is responsible for the never-ending volcanism on the surface. 'The unknown part that's been an open question of decades is what that means for the interior structure,' said Mike Sori, a planetary geophysicist at Purdue University. Where is that tidal heating focused within Io, and just how much heat and melting is it generating? Courtest of Mark Belan/Quanta Magazine NASA's Galileo spacecraft studied Jupiter and several of its moons around the turn of the millennium. One of its instruments was a magnetometer, and it picked up a peculiar magnetic field emanating from Io. The signal appeared to be coming from an electrically conductive fluid—a lot of fluid, in fact. After years of study, scientists concluded in 2011 that Galileo had detected a global magma ocean just below Io's crust. Whereas Earth's mantle is mostly solid and plasticky, Io's subsurface was thought to be filled with an ocean of liquid rock 50 kilometers thick, or almost five times thicker than the Pacific Ocean at its deepest point. A similar magnetic field was coming from Europa, too—in this case, apparently generated by a vast ocean of salty water. The implications were profound: With a lot of rocky material, tidal heating can make oceans of magma. With plenty of ice, it can create oceans of potentially habitable liquid water. Volcanic Vanishing Act By the time the Juno spacecraft started swinging around Jupiter in 2016, the belief that Io had a magma ocean was widespread. But Bolton and his colleagues wanted to double-check. A sequence of images taken over the course of eight minutes by NASA's New Horizons probe in 2007 shows an eruption by the Tvashtar Paterae volcanic region. The plume in this false-color image rises 330 kilometers from the moon's surface. Video: NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute During flybys in December 2023 and February 2024, Juno came within 1,500 kilometers of Io's scorched surface. Although the remarkable images of active volcanoes drew everyone's attention, the goal of these flybys was to find out if a magma ocean truly lay beneath the moon's rocky skin. To investigate, the team used an unlikely tool: Juno's radio transponder, which communicates with Earth, sending and receiving signals. Because of Io's unevenly distributed mass, its gravitational field isn't perfectly symmetrical. That uneven gravitational field subtly alters the motion of Juno as it flies by, causing it to accelerate or decelerate a little. That means Juno's radio transmissions will experience the Doppler effect, where the wavelength shifts slightly in response to Io's uneven gravitational field. By looking at the incredibly small shifts in the transmissions, Bolton's team was able to create a high-fidelity picture of Io's gravitational field and use that to determine its internal structure. 'If there were indeed a global magma ocean, you'd see a lot more distortion as Io orbited around Jupiter and as the tidal forces flexed it and changed its shape,' said Ashley Davies, a volcanologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory who wasn't involved with the new study. But Bolton's team did not find this level of distortion. Their conclusion was clear. 'There cannot be a shallow magma ocean fueling the volcanoes,' said study coauthor Ryan Park, a Juno co-investigator at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The Cassini-Huygens mission photographed Io against the backdrop of Jupiter in 2001. Photograph: NASA/JPL/University of Arizona So what else might be powering Io's volcanoes? On Earth, discrete reservoirs of magma of different types—from the tarlike viscous matter that powers explosive eruptions to the runnier, honey-esque stuff that gushes out of some volcanoes—are located within the crust at various depths, all created by the interactions of tectonic plates, the moving jigsaw pieces that make up Earth's surface. Io lacks plate tectonics and (perhaps) a diversity of magma types, but its crust may nevertheless be peppered with magma reservoirs. This was one of the original lines of thought until Galileo's data convinced many of the magma ocean theory. The new study doesn't rule out a far deeper magma ocean. But that abyssal cache would have to be filled with magma so iron-rich and dense (because of its great depth) that it would struggle to migrate to the surface and power Io's volcanism. 'And at some depth, it becomes tricky to distinguish between what we would call a deep magma ocean versus a liquid core,' Park said. For some, this raises an irreconcilable problem. Galileo's magnetometer detected signs of a shallow magma ocean, but Juno gravity data has emphatically ruled that out. 'People are not really disputing the magnetometer results, so you have to make that fit with everything else,' said Jani Radebaugh, a planetary geologist at Brigham Young University. Researchers disagree on the best interpretation of the Galileo data. The magnetic signals 'were taken as probably the best evidence for a magma ocean, but really they weren't that strong,' said Francis Nimmo, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a coauthor of the new study. The induction data couldn't distinguish between a partly molten (but still solid) interior and a fully molten magma ocean, he said. Heavy Water Perhaps the main reason scientists study Io is because it teaches us about the fundamentals of tidal heating. Io's tidal heating engine remains impressive—there's clearly a lot of volcano-feeding magma being generated. But if it's not producing a subsurface magma ocean, does that mean tidal heating doesn't generate water oceans, either? Scientists remain confident that it does. Nobody doubts that Saturn's moon Enceladus, which is also tidally heated, contains an underground saltwater ocean; the Cassini spacecraft not only detected signs of its existence but directly sampled some of it erupting out of the moon's South Pole. And although there is some light skepticism about whether Europa has an ocean, most scientists think it does. The smooth, lightly scratched surface of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, photographed by the Juno spacecraft in 2022, shows no sign of what lies beneath: in all likelihood, a vast saltwater ocean. Photograph: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS Crucially, unlike Io's odd magnetic field, which seemed to indicate that it concealed an ocean's worth of fluid, Europa's own Galileo-era magnetic signal remains robust. 'It's a pretty clean result at Europa,' said Robert Pappalardo, the Europa mission's project scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The icy moon is far enough from Jupiter and the intense plasma-flooded space environment of Io that Europa's own magnetic induction signal 'really sticks out.' But if both moons are tidally heated, why does only Europa have an inner ocean? According to Nimmo, 'there's a fundamental difference between a liquid-water ocean and a magma ocean. The magma wants to escape; the water really doesn't.' Liquid rock is less dense than solid rock, so it wants to rise and erupt quickly; the new study suggests that it doesn't linger at depth long enough inside Io to form a massive, interconnected ocean. But liquid water is, unusually, denser than its solid icy form. 'Liquid water is heavy, so it collects into an ocean,' Sori said. 'I think that's the big-picture message from this paper,' Sori added. Tidal heating might struggle to create magma oceans. But on icy moons, it can easily make watery oceans due to the bizarrely low density of ice. And that suggests life has a multitude of potentially habitable environments throughout the solar system to call home. Hell's Poster Child The revelation that Io is missing its shallow magma ocean underscores just how little is known about tidal heating. 'We've never really understood where in Io's interior the mantle is melting, how that mantle melt is getting to the surface,' de Kleer said. Our own moon shows evidence of primeval tidal heating too. Its oldest crystals formed 4.51 billion years ago from the stream of molten matter that got blasted off Earth by a giant impact event. But a lot of lunar crystals seem to have formed from a second reservoir of molten rock 4.35 billion years ago. Where did that later magma come from? Nimmo and coauthors offered one idea in a paper published in Nature in December: Maybe Earth's moon was like Io. The moon was significantly closer to Earth back then, and the gravitational fields from the Earth and the sun were battling for control. At a certain threshold, when the gravitational influence of both were roughly equal, the moon might have temporarily adopted an elliptical orbit and gotten tidally heated by Earth's gravitational kneading. Its interior might have remelted, causing a surprise secondary flourish of volcanism. But exactly where within the moon's interior its tidal heating was concentrated—and thus, where all that melting was happening—isn't clear. Perhaps if Io can be understood, so too can our moon—as well as several of the other satellites in our solar system with hidden tidal engines. For now, this volcanic orb remains maddeningly inscrutable. 'Io's a complicated beast,' Davies said. 'The more we observe it, the more sophisticated the data and the analyses, the more puzzling it becomes.' Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.
Atlantic
10-06-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
Good Taste Is More Important Than Ever
There's a lesson I once learned from a CEO—a leader admired not just for his strategic acumen but also for his unerring eye for quality. He's renowned for respecting the creative people in his company. Yet he's also unflinching in offering pointed feedback. When asked what guided his input, he said, 'I may not be a creative genius, but I've come to trust my taste.' That comment stuck with me. I've spent much of my career thinking about leadership. In conversations about what makes any leader successful, the focus tends to fall on vision, execution, and character traits such as integrity and resilience. But the CEO put his finger on a more ineffable quality. Taste is the instinct that tells us not just what can be done, but what should be done. A corporate leader's taste shows up in every decision they make: whom they hire, the brand identity they shape, the architecture of a new office building, the playlist at a company retreat. These choices may seem incidental, but collectively, they shape culture and reinforce what the organization aspires to be. Taste is a subtle sensibility, more often a secret weapon than a person's defining characteristic. But we're entering a time when its importance has never been greater, and that's because of AI. Large language models and other generative-AI tools are stuffing the world with content, much of it, to use the term du jour, absolute slop. In a world where machines can generate infinite variations, the ability to discern which of those variations is most meaningful, most beautiful, or most resonant may prove to be the rarest—and most valuable—skill of all. I like to think of taste as judgment with style. Great CEOs, leaders, and artists all know how to weigh competing priorities, when to act and when to wait, how to steer through uncertainty. But taste adds something extra—a certain sense of how to make that decision in a way that feels fitting. It's the fusion of form and function, the ability to elevate utility with elegance. Think of Steve Jobs unveiling the first iPhone. The device itself was extraordinary, but the launch was more than a technical reveal—it was a performance. The simplicity of the black turtleneck, the deliberate pacing of the announcement, the clean typography on the slides—none of this was accidental. It was all taste. And taste made Apple more than a tech company; it made it a design icon. OpenAI's recently announced acquisition of Io, a startup created by Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, can be seen, among other things, as an opportunity to increase the AI giant's taste quotient. Taste is neither algorithmic nor accidental. It's cultivated. AI can now write passable essays, design logos, compose music, and even offer strategic business advice. It does so by mimicking the styles it has seen, fed to it in massive—and frequently unknown or obscured —data sets. It has the power to remix elements and bring about plausible and even creative new combinations. But for all its capabilities, AI has no taste. It cannot originate style with intentionality. It cannot understand why one choice might have emotional resonance while another falls flat. It cannot feel the way in which one version of a speech will move an audience to tears—or laughter—because it lacks lived experience, cultural intuition, and the ineffable sense of what is just right. This is not a technical shortcoming. It is a structural one. Taste is born of human discretion—of growing up in particular places, being exposed to particular cultural references, developing a point of view that is inseparable from personality. In other words, taste is the human fingerprint on decision making. It is deeply personal and profoundly social. That's precisely what makes taste so important right now. As AI takes over more of the mechanical and even intellectual labor of work—coding, writing, diagnosing, analyzing—we are entering a world in which AI-generated outputs, and the choices that come with them, are proliferating across, perhaps even flooding, a range of industries. Every product could have a dozen AI-generated versions for teams to consider. Every strategic plan, numerous different paths. Every pitch deck, several visual styles. Generative AI is an effective tool for inspiration—until that inspiration becomes overwhelming. When every option is instantly available, when every variation is possible, the person who knows which one to choose becomes even more valuable. This ability matters for a number of reasons. For leaders or aspiring leaders of any type, taste is a competitive advantage, even an existential necessity—a skill they need to take seriously and think seriously about refining. But it's also in everyone's interest, even people who are not at the top of the decision tree, for leaders to be able to make the right choices in the AI era. Taste, after all, has an ethical dimension. We speak of things as being 'in good taste' or 'in poor taste.' These are not just aesthetic judgments; they are moral ones. They signal an awareness of context, appropriateness, and respect. Without human scrutiny, AI can amplify biases and exacerbate the world's problems. Countless examples already exist: Consider a recent experimental-AI shopping tool released by Google that, as reported by The Atlantic, can easily be manipulated to produce erotic images of celebrities and minors. Good taste recognizes the difference between what is edgy and what is offensive, between what is novel and what is merely loud. It demands integrity. Like any skill, taste can be developed. The first step is exposure. You have to see, hear, and feel a wide range of options to understand what excellence looks like. Read great literature. Listen to great speeches. Visit great buildings. Eat great food. Pay attention to the details: the pacing of a paragraph, the curve of a chair, the color grading of a film. Taste starts with noticing. The second step is curation. You have to begin to discriminate. What do you admire? What do you return to? What feels overdesigned, and what feels just right? Make choices about your preferences—and, more important, understand why you prefer them. Ask yourself what values those preferences express. Minimalism? Opulence? Precision? Warmth? The third step is reflection. Taste is not static. As you evolve, so will your sensibilities. Keep track of how your preferences change. Revisit things you once loved. Reconsider things you once dismissed. This is how taste matures—from reaction to reflection, from preference to philosophy. Taste needs to considered in both education and leadership development. It shouldn't be left to chance or confined to the arts. Business schools, for example, could do more to expose students to beautiful products, elegant strategies, and compelling narratives. Leadership programs could train aspiring executives in the discernment of tone, timing, and presentation. Case studies, after all, are about not just good decisions, but how those decisions were expressed, when they went into action, and why they resonated. Taste can be taught, if we're willing to make space for it.
Yahoo
26-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Jupiter designed the solar system. Here's what the planet was like as a child.
Jupiter, the largest planet orbiting the sun, used to be much bigger and stronger when the solar system was just beginning to take shape, a pair of astronomers say. Two scientists at Caltech and the University of Michigan suggest that early Jupiter was at least double its contemporary size. The primitive version of the gas giant could have held some 8,000 Earths within it, said Konstantin Batygin, lead author of the new study. What's more, young Jupiter probably had a magnetic field 50 times more powerful. A magnetic field is an invisible force surrounding a planet that interacts with charged particles coming from the sun and cosmic rays. To calculate those measurements, the scientists looked at how Jupiter's moons move through space and how the planet spins. This unconventional approach, which didn't rely on traditional models, may fill gaps in the solar system's history. Many scientists refer to Jupiter as the "architect" of the solar system because its immense gravity influenced the orbits of other planets and carved up the cloud from which they all emerged. "More than any other planet, Jupiter played a key role in shaping our solar system," Batygin said in a post on X. "Yet details of its early physical state are elusive." SEE ALSO: Private spacecraft circling moon snaps photo with strange optical illusion NASA's Juno spacecraft snaps images of Jupiter and catches the tiny moon Amalthea as it orbits the planet. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SwRI / MSSS / Gerald Eichstädt The paper, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, rewinds the clock to just 3.8 million years after the first solid objects formed in the solar system and the cloud of gas and dust from which everything formed started to evaporate. This period — when the building materials for planets disappeared — is thought to be a pivotal point, when the general design of the solar system was locked in. Jupiter, roughly 562 million miles from Earth today, has nearly 100 moons. But Batygin and his collaborator Fred Adams' research focused on two of the smaller ones, Amalthea and Thebe. Both are inside the orbit of the much larger moon Io, the most volcanically active world in the solar system, according to NASA. These smaller moons have curiously tilted orbits, and their paths around the planet seem to hold clues about how Jupiter and its bevy of moons moved in the past, Batygin told Mashable. As Io migrates away from Jupiter, its gravity causes a kickback — sort of like how a gun recoils when it's fired — that has contributed to the tilts of the smaller moons. "Similar to how our moon gradually moves away from Earth due to tides, Io is slowly drifting outward from Jupiter," Batygin said. By measuring Amalthea and Thebe's tilted orbits, the scientists reconstructed Io's previous position. That location, they said, should help determine the outer edge of the disk of gas and dust that once surrounded the planet. Based on where they believe the disk ended, the researchers extrapolated how fast Jupiter was spinning back then: about once per day, comparable to its spin now. Knowing Jupiter's early spin also helped them calculate its size. By applying the physics rules of spinning objects, they figured out how big Jupiter had to have been to match that rotation. The size of a young planet sheds light on its heat and interior dynamics as well. The scientists have concluded that early Jupiter must have started out extremely hot — about 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's a far cry from its modern average temperature of about -170 degrees. The heat suggests Jupiter had a much stronger magnetic field. That allowed the team to calculate how fast Jupiter was collecting gas and growing — about the weight of one modern-day Jupiter every million years. "It's astonishing," said Adams in a statement, "that even after 4.5 billion years, enough clues remain to let us reconstruct Jupiter's physical state at the dawn of its existence."
San Francisco Chronicle
22-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
OpenAI to buy iPhone designer Jony Ive's startup for $6.5 billion. Here's what it means for S.F.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and famed Apple designer Jony Ive have joined forces to build the 'iPhone of AI,' with OpenAI agreeing to buy Ive's new startup Io for $6.5 billion. The purchase would be OpenAI's biggest deal ever, uniting two of the most prominent names in tech and giving San Francisco another economic win in the nascent industry. The team will create a 'new family of products' for artificial intelligence, Altman and Ive said in a joint statement Wednesday. The deal is subject to regulatory approval. Ive, who left Apple in 2019, and his San Francisco design studio LoveFrom began working with Altman two years ago. Altman has been frequently seen in the city's Jackson Square neighborhood where LoveFrom's headquarters is located. 'A collaboration built upon friendship, curiosity and shared values quickly grew in ambition. Tentative ideas and explorations evolved into tangible designs,' the statement said. Io was co-founded by Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan. Ive and his team 'will assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI.' Ive declined further comment on the deal. The startup employs 55 people, who will all become OpenAI employees, but will remain based in Jackson Square. Io is located in that neighborhood, close to LoveFrom's headquarters, in a building Ive purchased, the Chronicle has learned. Ive's multi million dollar purchases of a string of adjacent aging buildings centered around the 800 block of Montgomery Street in the ritzy Jackson Square neighborhood have made headlines in recent years. He has launched an extensive renovation effort to revitalize them as LoveFrom's home base, which is ongoing. Altman has also made major real estate moves. He leased close to 1 million square feet across three separate buildings in the city's Mission Bay neighborhood where he moved OpenAI. 'Jony Ive and OpenAI's partnership is a big vote of confidence in San Francisco,' Mayor Daniel Lurie said in a social media post. 'Our city has a strong history of creativity and innovation, a legacy that is alive and well today. This is the place to create the future.' Sarah Dennis Phillips, executive director of the city's Office of Economic and Workforce Development, said that the deal between Altman and Ive "perfectly illustrates what San Francisco is — a unique ecosystem where ambitious ideas are discussed, challenged, tested and formed into action." "San Francisco has been Jony Ive's creative home. San Francisco birthed OpenAI and supported Sam Altman's ongoing innovation," she said. "It's where these incredible individuals, their creativity and their innovation can crash together to create something new." The Emerson Collective, a social change organization founded by philanthropist and entrepreneur Laurene Powell Jobs, and Thrive Capital, a venture capital firm led by Joshua Kushner — the brother of President Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner — have been confirmed as investors in Io. Sources have confirmed to the Chronicle that Powell Jobs has also purchased real estate in Jackson Square. The Chronicle reported last year that Thrive Capital paid roughly $9 million for 451 Pacific Ave., a near century old brick-and-timber office building that is located a block over from LoveFrom's headquarters. "Jackson Square, where this collaboration is taking shape, has quietly become a magnet for visionary creators," said Claude Imbault, vice president of Planning and Economic Development for placemaking organization Downtown SF Partnership. "It's both the birthplace of modern San Francisco and a hub for building the future." Sources with insight into OpenAI's acquisition of Ive's startup said that more hires are likely and that Ive's team is 'doubling down' on San Francisco. In a video featuring Altman and Ive walking past sweeping views of San Francisco's Transamerica Pyramid and a foggy Golden Gate Bridge, the two men lauded each other — Ive crediting Altman for 'humility' and Altman calling Ive the 'deepest thinker.' They meet at Cafe Zoetrope in North Beach. 'San Francisco has been like a mythical place in American history,' said Altman. 'It is the city I most associate with the sort of leading edge of culture and technology.' The video feels like a love letter to San Francisco. 'This city has enabled and been the place of the creation of so much,' said Ive. 'I feel I owe this city such an enormous debt of gratitude.' 'This is another success story for San Francisco. This shows that we continue to be the best place in the world to bring world-changing ideas to life,' said Supervisor Danny Sauter, who represents Jackson Square. He said that Ive and his company 'have been positive partners in the neighborhood with open and transparent communication and we hope and expect that to continue.'
Yahoo
22-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
OpenAI's Ambitions Just Became Crystal Clear
Sam Altman is done with keyboards and screens. All that swiping and typing and scrolling—too much potential friction between you and ChatGPT. Earlier today, OpenAI announced its intentions to solve this apparent problem. The company is partnering with Jony Ive, the longtime head of design at Apple, who did pioneering work on products such as the iMac G3, the iPod, and, most famously, the iPhone. Together, Altman and Ive say they want to create hardware built specifically for AI software. Everyone, Altman suggested in a highly produced announcement video, could soon have access to a 'team of geniuses'—presumably, ChatGPT-style assistants—on a 'family of devices.' Such technology 'deserves something much better' than today's laptops, he argued. What that will look like, exactly, he didn't say, and OpenAI declined my request for comment. But the firm will pay roughly $5 billion to acquire Io, Ive's start-up, to figure that 'something much better' out as Ive takes on 'deep design and creative responsibilities' across OpenAI. (Emerson Collective, the majority owner of The Atlantic, is an investor in both Io and OpenAI. And OpenAI entered a corporate partnership with The Atlantic last year.) [Read: The great AI lock-in has begun] Moving into hardware could become OpenAI's most technologically disruptive, and financially lucrative, expansion to date. AI assistants are supposed to help with everything, so it's only natural to try to replace the phones and computers that people do everything on. If the company is successful, within a decade you might be reading (or listening to) a ChatGPT-generated news roundup on an OpenAI device instead of reading an article on your iPhone, or asking the device to file your taxes instead of logging in to TurboTax. In Altman's view, current devices offer only clunky ways to use AI products: You have to open an app or a website, upload the relevant information, continually prompt the AI bot, and then transfer any useful outputs elsewhere. In the promotional video, Ive agrees, suggesting that the era of personal computers and smartphones—a period that he helped define—needs a refresh: 'It's just common sense to at least think, surely, there's something beyond these legacy products,' he tells Altman. Although OpenAI and Io have not specified what they are building, a number of wearable AI pins, smartglasses, and other devices announced over the past year have suggested a vision of an AI assistant always attached to your body—an 'external brain,' as Altman called it today. These products have, so far, uniformly flopped. As just one example, Humane, the maker of a $700 AI 'pin' that attached to a user's clothing, shut down the poorly reviewed product less than a year after launch. Ive, in an interview today with Bloomberg, called these early AI gadgets 'very poor products.' And Apple and OpenAI have had their own share of uninspiring, or even embarrassing, product releases. Still, if any pair has a shot at designing a legitimately useful AI device, it is likely the man who unleashed ChatGPT partnering with someone who led the design of the Apple smartphones, tablets, and laptops that have defined decades of American life and technology. Certainly, a bespoke device would also rapidly accelerate OpenAI's commercial ambitions. The company, once a small research lab, is now valued at $300 billion and growing rapidly, and in March reported that half a billion people use ChatGPT each week. Already, OpenAI is angling to replace every major tech firm: ChatGPT is an internet search tool as powerful as Google, can help you shop online and remove the need to type into Amazon, can be your work software instead of the Microsoft Office suite. OpenAI is even reportedly building a social-media platform. For now, OpenAI relies on the smartphones and web browsers people use to access ChatGPT—products that are all made by business rivals. Altman is trying to cut out the middleman and condense digital life into a single, unified piece of hardware and software. The promise is this: Your whole life could be lived through such a device, turning OpenAI's products into a repository of uses and personal data that could be impossible to leave—just as, if everyone in your family has an iPhone, Macbook, and iCloud storage plan, switching to Android is deeply unpleasant and challenging. [Read: 'We're definitely going to build a bunker before we release AGI'] Several other major tech firms are also trying to integrate generative AI into their legacy devices and software. Amazon has incorporated generative AI into the Alexa voice assistant, Google into its Android phones and search bar, and Apple into the iPhone. Meta has built an AI assistant into its apps and sells smartglasses. Products and platforms which disrupted work, social life, education, and more in the early 2000s are showing their age: Google has become crowded with search-optimized sites and AI-generated content that can make it harder for users to find good information; Amazon is filled with junk; Facebook is a cesspool; and the smartphone is commonly viewed as attention-sapping, if not outright brain-melting. Tech behemoths are jury-rigging AI features into their products to avoid being disrupted—but these rollouts, and Apple's in particular, have been disastrous, giving dangerous health advice, butchering news summaries, and generally crowding and slowing user experiences. Almost 20 years ago, when Apple introduced the iPhone, Steve Jobs said in a now-famous speech that 'every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.' Seeming to be in pursuit of similar magic, today's video announcing OpenAI's foray into hardware began with Altman saying, 'I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer.' But Jobs had an actual product to share and sell. Altman, for now, is marketing his imagination. Article originally published at The Atlantic
