It’s “the good piece of expertise the world has ever seen.” It’s going to “utterly reimagine what it means to make use of a pc.” It’s the “starting of the best technological revolution in our lifetimes.”
It’s a flooring wax and a dessert topping.
In one of many extra head-scratching branding workouts in latest Silicon Valley historical past, OpenAI on Thursday dropped a nine-minute video of CEO Sam Altman and former Apple designer Jony Ive strolling the streets of San Francisco, settling onto a few stools in a macchiato bar, and chatting amiably — one may even say bromantically — about how a lot they admire each other.
Additionally, how the brand new thriller gizmo they’re constructing collectively — regardless of the hell it is perhaps — will change the course of human evolution.
Not surprisingly, the web had a area day. “How is that this not satire?” one viewer requested. “I’ll be comfortable if no matter product they create saves me the 9:21 minutes I misplaced watching this,” posted one other. Some mocked the overly polished manufacturing (“ChatGPT glazes an excessive amount of”), others zoomed in on Ive’s awkward gait (“Is Jony new to strolling?”), and a complete lot of parents targeted on the gushing endearments between the 2 tech bros. One San Francisco outlet nailed it as an “engagement-party-style sizzle reel.”
However whereas the video says nothing in regards to the precise system, it’s not fully unilluminating — if you recognize the forged of characters.
Directed by Davis Guggenheim (the An Inconvenient Fact man), the video was produced with backing from Laurene Powell Jobs, who helped launch Guggenheim’s Concordia Studio and likewise backed Ive’s {hardware} startup OI, which Open AI simply acquired in a $6.5 billion share-swap deal, an enormous wager on an organization that has but to unveil a single prototype.
All of those elements make this video greater than only a teaser — it’s a coalition. Steve Jobs’ widow, the man most wanting to be the following Steve Jobs (Altman), and certainly one of Jobs’ closest design collaborators (Ive) teaming as much as tackle Jobs’ previous firm — and beat it at its personal recreation, not simply by constructing a shiny new gadget, however by presumably laying the primary brick in an Apple-style “household” of AI-native units, engineered to sync, to speak, to possibly even end your sentences.
So what’s Altman and Ive’s new earth-shaking product, precisely? We nonetheless don’t know. Not the title, not the shape, not even a silhouette. Simply the phrase “system” — repeated like a mantra — and the promise that it’s going to one way or the other make us really feel extra “current.”
What we’re left with, for now, is 9 minutes of reverent stares, ambient piano, and two males on stools telling us {that a} revolution is coming — whereas fastidiously displaying us completely nothing.