👉 Background: Apple's iconic gadgets such as the iPhone, Apple Watch, the iPad were all designed by one man: Sir Jony Ive – aka Steve Jobs’ ‘spiritual partner’. He’s been considered the guru of smartphone and tech design. Ives left Apple in 2019 and started a company called io last year.

👉 What happened: It’s not entirely clear what io have or haven’t built so far, but now OpenAI will acquire io in a $6.5 billion USD all-stock deal. And, this is OpenAI’s biggest acquisition ever.

👉 What else: Ive and OpenAI CEO say they’re working on “a family of devices for the AI age”, and the first product is expected next year. While we don’t have any details on the product, we know that OpenAI will bring over 55 engineers and designers from io… with many who helped shape Apple’s devices.

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What's the key learning?

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💡An “acqui-hire” is when a company buys another company not just for its products, but for its people. It has become pretty common in tech, especially when you need a shortcut to building a top-tier team.

💡OpenAI is buying access to one of the most iconic industrial designers of all time as well as his current team. That’s a huge advantage when trying to launch AI-powered hardware device particularly because OpenAI doesn’t have that skillset right now. That alone sent Apple’s share price down 2.3%.

💡It’s not the first time we’ve seen a company do an acqui-hire. In 2014, Google acqui-hired the artificial intelligence company DeepMind for more than $400 million USD. And Google has managed to leverage DeepMind’s team of AI experts to advance Google’s AI capabilities in tools like Gemini.