Sam & Jony introduce io

I think we have the opportunity here to kind of completely reimagine what it means to use a computer. Sam is a rare visionary. He shoulders incredible responsibility, but his curiosity, his humility remain utterly inspiring.

Jony is the deepest thinker of anyone I have ever met. What that leads him to be able to come up with is unmatched. I moved to America, drawn by the exhilarating optimism of San Francisco and Silicon Valley.

We are sitting at the beginning of what I believe will be the greatest technological revolution of our lifetimes. I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the last 30 years has led me to this place, and to this moment. Morning, Jony.

Hey Sam. - Good, how are you doing? - Good.

So what is this announcement we're talking about? Two years ago, Jony and I started talking about what the future of AI and new kinds of computers was going to look like. I was running OpenAI.

Jony’s running a design firm called LoveFrom that had established itself as really the, I think, densest collection of talent that I've ever heard of in one place and probably has ever existed in the world. And it became very quickly apparent to both of us that we needed a third company. A year ago, I founded io with Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, who are the most extraordinary engineers.

They have built a team of remarkable subject matter experts that range from hardware and software engineering, physicists, researchers, product manufacturing experts. And so, io is merging with OpenAI. Formed with the mission of figuring out how to create a family of devices that would let people use AI to create all sorts of wonderful things.

The first one we've been working on, I think, is has just completely captured our imagination. You know, Jony called one day and said, this is the best work our team has ever done. I mean, Jony did the iPhone, Jony did the MacBook Pro.

I mean, these are, these are like the defining ways people use technology. It's hard to beat those things. Those are really wonderful.

Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I've been able to live with it, and I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen. The products that we're using to deliver and connect us to unimaginable technology, they’re decades old. Yeah.

And so it's just common sense to at least think, surely there's something beyond these legacy products. We have, like, magic intelligence in the cloud. If I wanted to ask ChatGPT something right now about something we had talked about earlier, think about what would happen.

I would like reached down. I would get on my laptop, I'd open it up, I’d launch a web browser, I'd start typing, and I'd have to, like, explain that thing. And I would hit enter, and I would wait, and I would get a response.

And that is at the limit of what the current tool of a laptop can do. But I think this technology deserves something much better. So how did it all begin?

So my son Charlie was the first, the first person in the family to use ChatGPT. And he said, you've just got, you've got to meet Sam. I met Jony’s family relatively quickly after meeting Jony, and it was sort of just like, it was an impossibly lovely family.

I was just thinking, what a privilege it is to really connect with somebody new. And it's. .

. it hasn't happened to me in a long time. And the reason I think that it happened is we had both a very strong shared vision.

We maybe didn't know exactly where we were going to go, but like, the direction of the force vector felt clear. And then this, like, deeply shared sense of values about what technology should be, when technology's been really good, when it's gone wrong. I mean, that was, in a way, one of the bases, I think, for one of the reasons Sam and I clicked was despite our wonderfully different journeys to this point, our motivations and values are completely the same.

In my experience, if you're trying to have a sense of where you are going to end up, you shouldn't look at the technology. You should look at the people who are making the decisions, and you should look at what drives, motivates, and look at values. San Francisco has been like a mythical place in American history, and maybe in world history in some sense.

It is the city that I most associate with the sort of leading edge of culture and technology. This city has enabled and been the place of the creation of so much. The fact that all of those things happened in the Bay Area and not anywhere else on this gigantic planet we live on, I think is really not an accident.

There's a lot of, like, weird quirky details about geography that I think matter, that the way the city is set up. You know, I mean the absurd hills. Why, why you would choose to actually put so much energy into building on this topography is insane.

I think there's something about San Francisco. You don't get to pick and choose freedom. Either you have like you let creative freedom be expressed in all of its weirdness or you don't.

I feel I owe this city such an enormous debt of gratitude. I want this to be democratized. I want everybody to have it.

I don't want it to be the tiny percentage of the population that figures out how to use bad tools, and is really smart. I want anybody to say, hey, I have this idea. Make it happen.

The responsibility that Sam bears is— actually, is honestly beyond my comprehension. I have a sense of some of it. But I see him and I have seen him over the last two years shoulder that responsibility, I mean, late, late, late into the night.

But what really struck me is what he's worrying about is not himself and it's not his company. What I see you worrying about are other people, are about customers, about society, about culture. And to me, that tells me everything I want to know about someone.

You talk to people who use our latest model and say, this is, like, genius-level in every field, and you just have to put in the work to like, pull it all together. But if you have a hard problem, you can have this, like, team of geniuses in all of their different disciplines, and they report, I'm two or three times more productive as a scientist than I was before. I'm two or three times faster to find a cure for cancer than I was before, because I have this incredible external brain.

That just didn't exist six months ago. I think this will be one of these moments of just an absolute embarrassment of riches of what people go create for collective society. I am absolutely certain that we are literally on the brink of a new generation of technology that can make us our better selves.