Latest news with #Io
Yahoo
7 days ago
- 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
Atlantic
22-05-2025
- Business
- Atlantic
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.) 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. 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.
WIRED
21-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
OpenAI's Big Bet That Jony Ive Can Make AI Hardware Work
May 21, 2025 2:33 PM Io, a firm Ive and Sam Altman cocreated, will now merge with OpenAI. ony Ive presents the Fashion Icon award on stage during The Fashion Awards 2019 held at Royal Albert Hall in London, England. Photograph:OpenAI has fully acquired Io, a joint venture it cocreated last year with Jony Ive, the famed British designer behind the sleek industrial aesthetic that defined the iPhone and more than two decades of Apple products. In a nearly 10-minute video posted to X Wednesday, Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the Apple pioneer's 'creative collective' will 'merge with OpenAI to work more intimately with the research, engineering, and product teams in San Francisco.' OpenAI says it's paying $5 billion dollars in equity to acquire io. The promotional video included musings on technology from both Ive and Altman, set against the golden-hour backdrop of the streets of San Francisco, but the two never share exactly what it is they're building. 'We look forward to sharing our work next year,' a text statement at the end of the video reads. Given the pair's emphasis on building a hardware device for the AI era, and Ive's pedigree at Apple, it's likely a consumer-facing product. Io launched last spring as part of a joint project between Ive's design firm LoveFrom and OpenAI. In the fourth quarter of last year, Io and OpenAI entered into an official agreement for OpenAI to receive a 23 percent stake in io. Now, OpenAI is buying the entity outright. The merger is a slightly complicated one. The Io team was made up of 55 people prior to this announcement. Now it will expand to include both io and OpenAI employees—hardware and software engineers, physicists, scientists, and 'experts in product development and manufacturing,' according to a blog post on OpenAI's website. Ive and Lovefrom will manage the creative design process. But Ive himself will remain independent, OpenAI says, and his firm LoveFrom will continue to operate as a separate entity. The io team will instead report into Peter Welinder, OpenAI's vice president of product, who has worked at OpenAI for eight and a half years. Io's founding team has major design chops. Beyond Ive, the founders include Evans Hankey and Tang Tan, who both worked at Apple. Those who've worked closely with them say they're known to hire people whom they believe have exceptional taste. By bringing on Ive, OpenAI is officially embarking on what is likely one of the more ambitious AI hardware project to date. A number of other major tech companies, including Meta and Google, have tried developing AI-powered devices such as smartglasses in recent years, but mainstream adoption of the technology has been slow and some devices have been plagued by glitches. Humane, another high-profile AI hardware startup founded by former Apple employees, debuted a wearable device in late 2023. Reviewers later found the device, a pin, was susceptible to overheating and a number of other issues. Less than two years later, Humane's devices were pulled from the market and its operating system software and patents were sold to printer giant HP. The joint effort between Altman and Ive was spurred by advancements in AI and also compute power. In its blog post, OpenAI wrote that 'computers are now seeing, thinking and understanding.' Altman reportedly has hardware ambitions beyond the generative AI software his company develops and sells, and Ive has seemingly been eager to make new imprints in the design world since he left Apple in 2019. 'I have a growing sense that everything I have learned over the past 30 years has led me to this moment,' Ive said in the video. 'While I am both anxious and excited about the responsibility of the substantial work ahead, I am so grateful for the opportunity to be a part of such an important collaboration.'
