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Comment by nickrubin | Hacker News Reader

OpenAI announcement: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

The whole thing is almost indistinguishable from satire, without the domain name I'd have thought I'd been had.

The photo, the text, the video where Sam nearly looks like CGI, and then the quotes at the bottom really make for a full package of cringe.

I wasn't gonna check the link at first but you've convinced me, and holy shit that image of the two of them that greets you first thing is beyond hilarious.

You truly couldn't make this up, it's so beyond parody that I don't even know what to say. It's so palpably psychotic.

Reads and looks like an obituary, lol

I was thinking more like a wedding invite

Yeah, it's meant to look like a wedding announcement in the newspaper I think. Except white-on-black instead of the other way around.

The quotes at the bottom are funny because they have a share link which implies that Sam and Jony thought they were insightful enough that people would want to actively share them. Even in the extreme tech crowd, who would share those?

My reaction was just the same, but look at gruber:

https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/05/21/sam-and-jony-io

and gruber is stirring up drama about why his links don't do well on hn.

> It conveys grand ambition, but without pretension.

I wonder how it is possible that a human watches that video and will think they don't convey pretension

Indeed it may as well be an advert for pretension itself.

You clearly haven’t been on my side of LinkedIn / Twitter.

Is this an m&a press release or an engagement announcement

The hyperminimal white-text-on-black-background is more of an Apple-ism from their corporate announcements back during the Jobs/Ive days.

The center-justified serif text is new, though.

When is their big day? Do they have a registry to send gifts? Anyways, congrats, looks like a happy couple.

"Sam and Jony"??!? Sam and Jony sounds like John and Yoko. Nothing good ever came out of that pair.

Altman: "Jony was running a design firm called LoveFrom that had established itself as really the densest collection of talent that I've ever heard of in one place AND HAS PROBABLY EVER EXISTED IN THE WORLD."

I felt physically sick from second-hand embarrassment watching this.

German has a word for second hand embarrassment. Fremdschämen. Comes in very handy here. If Sam continues like this it won’t be long until it becomes part of the regular English language like other German words such as Kindergarten.

And I’ll be happy that I don’t have to explain Fremdschämen anymore. Everything has its upsides.

> until it becomes part of the regular English language like other German words such as Kindergarten.

or Schadenfreude.

Somehow when the buzz-word machine found talent density, half the passengers forgot that density has a denominator. I see this goof a lot. If you accept the premise that Jony is literally the most talented human in the entire history of the world (I know I know), then obviously he was more dense sitting in a room alone, than after being diluted by hiring 50 other people.

Seems like a weird move to say:

* Jony Ive has built a company with the densest collection of talent in the world

* OpenAI is spending 10 figures to buy a company from Ive

* It is not the aforementioned company with the dense collection of talent; it's instead a company that no one has heard of

I almost had to tap out after the number Ive did on Altman in the early monolouge. Feels like some kind of office satire written by Mike Judge

Very trumpian language.

Does he have anyone close to him to tell him that no amount of money can be used to turn oneself into Steve Jobs?

Jony would know about that as much as anyone.

First of all, the video is 9 minutes.

Secondly, is it a weird Sora-stitchedc video? It feels like they just filmed their parts separately like they're not even talking to each other/interacting with each other. Very peculiar.

The picture alone is enough to make you vomit

Deffinately a contender for one of the creepiest photos in the industry. Not something that inspires confidence in the "Design Prowess" of the acquisition if this is what they felt best represented them.

That and that every paragraph of text on the page is centre-aligned. What is this, Geocities?

Yeah, that is a really weird photo. Trying hard to replicate the iconic Steve Jobs photo I guess.

There's a video at the bottom "two friends"

There's infinite money out there for AI. They're doing the rational thing and buying up everything to lock others out.

If you're going to make any sort of hardware you definitely want to tout that it was designed "with love" by "the iPod guy."

The video is horrible.

It uses the same overhype playbook from the Segway launch: "Oh, I used the [unnamed, unexplained] device and it was the most amazing thing in the whole of human history!" "This object will cause the entire planet to be redesigned around it!"

I had to double check the domain, I thought it was a fake image gen. So weird.

Unclear if that announcing a tech acquisition or a new SF dating show.

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