A Silicon Valley Supergroup Is Coming Together to Create an A.I. Device

Since founding OpenAI in 2015, Sam Altman has spent many days thinking that the company’s generative artificial-intelligence products need a new kind of device to succeed. Since leaving Apple in 2019, Jony Ive, the designer behind the iPhone, iPod and MacBook Air, has been considering what the next great computing device could be.

Now, the two men and their companies are teaming up to develop a device that would succeed the smartphone and deliver the benefits of A.I. in a new form factor, unconstrained by the rectangular screen that has been the dominant computing tool of the past decade, according to two people familiar with the discussions.

The project was described as preliminary, but Mr. Altman and Mr. Ive have developed some early concepts and sought as much as $1 billion in funding from SoftBank, the Japanese technology investor led by Masayoshi Son, the people said. With SoftBank’s support, the two men could tap into the semiconductor expertise of Arm, the British chip design company Mr. Son bought in 2016 and recently went public.

The business structure behind the project remains unclear. Mr. Altman’s company, OpenAI, is an A.I. research lab in San Francisco spanning roughly 400 researchers, engineers and support staff members, while Mr. Ive’s San Francisco design firm, LoveFrom, has about three dozen industrial and software designers, as well as some engineers.