Jony Ive's OpenAI Device Barred From Using 'io' Name | Hacker News Reader

Jony Ive's OpenAI Device Barred From Using 'io' Name

macrumors.com

84 pointsthm61 comments

It’s not too late to reverse direction and call it “Oi”. Could there be a more perfect verbal activation? They could get Jason Statham or Vinnie Jones to do promotion.

Oi mate, you got a loicense for that trademark?

Not just trademarks! I can also picture Jason Statham getting pretty bent out of shape about GPL violations.

For further distinction you can put the guy's first initial in there and call it a JOI.

… a jerk off instruction?

I'm sure they could license some Cock Sparrer songs as well.

The device would be popular in England

And Brasil, Portugal and other portuguese-speaking places

Also with 1990's American skinheads.

Oi, tudo bem?

That photo of Ive and Altman is weird as hell. It looks like a promo shot for a bad early 90s made for TV movie.

It's so strangely creepy, it always feels like a it's cropped from a Giorgio Armani perfume ad or something.

I remember someone saying it looks like a pregnancy announcement, and that’s what I think of every time I see it

I guess it is in a way. They are going to pop out lots of tiny robots.

The associated announcement is good for a strange-vibes chuckle as well: https://openai.com/sam-and-jony/

"From Our Family to Yours"

"narcissistic dance off"

Anything I've seen about Ive hints at him being a kind, passionate man. I don't agree with his design choices but that's no excuse to hate him as a person.

I don't hate him as a person! But he is a massive narcissist.

What even is this mysterious device?

A device trying to duplicate a part of smartphone/smartwatch functionality is doomed to fail, as those can easily just be an app on said devices.

So the computation part is likely out of the question. Input/output remains, and there is really not much you can innovate here.

Smartglasses? EarPod clones?

It's going to be the Humane v2, just with a reality distortion field around it this time.

I'm beginning to believe that the picture of Sam and Jony is the product

It's just Ive being out of touch

Oi!

Reading about it, I see some characteristics: no screen, possibly something you can carry in your pocket, possibly has ai-driven awareness of its environment.

OpenAI wants to get into the hardware business, so they came up with something. Is it going to be something people actually want? I am skeptical, but as a consumer it's cool that so companies are trying out various new devices even if most of them are no good.

given the vagueness of the available information, i'm guessing they haven't actually defined its capabilities yet.

They can accept that building a smartphone is doomed to fail, and they want to build some hardware, so they're experimenting with all the "not a smartphone" form factors they can think of to see what sticks.

The article says the claimed in court that they're not working on a wearable device. So that rules out headphones, glasses, maybe comm badges.

I think it is going to be a set-top device that casts to the TV with built in sensors and a camera to enable you to FaceTime with your AI assistant/friend.

(Wrote a brief note about it here: https://zero2data.substack.com/p/openai-policy-and-privacy)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Milo

I'm sure it's going to be a smashing success 20 years later.

So, an echo style tabletop device?

So... Alexa but hooked up to ChatGPT?

Startrek chest pin.

combadge

It is a device that justifies a $40T market cap. /s

(Please don't look at our $60B a year burn rate financials.)

I am absolutely AGOG to know why this has to be a separate device. It must involve hardware and/or instrumentation not built into smartphones. Microwave scanner? mini x-ray machine? neutrino detector??? what could it be

Leaks were saying it's a Friend competitor https://friend.com

Just a chatbot in a box.

The market is ripe for ChatGPT in a box, replacing google home or Alexa desktop pucks. God knows the google home assistant has been detuned and detuned to the point it barely works for turning the lights on and off at this point. There's a handful of golf-ball shaped objects on AliExpress for $25 that provide this functionality, powered by an ESP32 IoT chip, but doesn't have wakeword capability (yet). I picked up two for a Home Assistant voice assistant project but haven't had time to dive into it yet.

I don't see it, I think people are burnt out and trained not to expect anything more than weather and Spotify from their "smart speakers"

You yourself have not felt the need to hook an LLM up, and you already have the hardware! :p

Oh but I have! And it is brilliant.

I've got codex-cli with speech-to-text hooked up to (among other things) Home Assistant via MCP.

It'll do anything. I can literally tell it to play some music from a playlist and make the lights flash to the beat, and it'll just figure out how to do that.

Is it fast? Not really. Is it annoyingly slow for quick tasks like turning the lights off? Not too annoying anyway. Turning the lights on/off takes about 4 seconds from when I finish speaking.

Because Apple won’t give you access to what you need as a dev for this kind of thing on iPhone: always-on audio listening to multiple streams : ambient sound, my voice, whatever is playing in my headphones … think an AI assistant listens to audiobooks together with you and allows you to ask questions / lookup things etc …

I hadn't heard of iyO, their products look interesting. Seems to be an Alexa type product via airpod style headphones? https://www.iyo.ai/iyo-one

and some sort of 'wand' that can "see your surrounding area", maybe radar or imaging? https://www.iyo.ai/iyo-wand

They don't mention a camera specifically, but it looks like the Wand has a camera in the end of it.

And they mention "Holding and pressing the action button turns the Privacy Light red and allows the agents to see anything you point Wand at."

"Hey iyO, can you help me load your page faster?" Incredible (on an older MBP).

Ridiculous, of course io is standard for input output, or even for on/off or even 1 and 0.

Hopefully this gets appealed, but it might be too late for this product launch

From the article: "However, the ruling does not bar all uses of the io name, only marketing and selling hardware similar to iyO's."

But openai presumably wants to trademark it too?

Oh, I assumed it was part of the product name rather than a whole. Like Chat IO, or just the wake up call and vocative name.

I wonder why they're trying to establish separate branding for hardware. Considering that OpenAI's strongest advantage right now is the ChatGPT brand and they're anyway cutting efforts on other products, wouldn't it make more sense to use the ChatGPT brand?

They certainly don't seem to have a problem with using the same name repeatedly given the 300-or-so products called Codex at OpenAI.

Revenge is a dish best served icy cold.

What is this OpenAI company I keep hearing about?

predictive text, real big again.

I think it's Microsoft's chatbot division.

is yo taken?

Yo definitely occupies an existing part of my mindspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

But imagine a modernized version of this where you can leverage AI to say "yo" to people?

Boyhood did it the same year:

https://x.com/hitRECordJoe/status/1378933672687067140

Yo MTV Raps beat them to trademark office.

About a decade ago

Now the makers of the Yo app should sue iyo.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yo_(app)

I don’t know if that picture is so fake as to be incredibly dumb but holy shit, burn it with fire.

It’s such an uncreative name, anyway. It’s like something you’d read from a hardware engineering GitHub repository where the author was oblivious to how searchable the intellectual property would be.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com