Can Jony and Sam Stay Married?

The first thing that came to my mind was when Steve Jobs hired John Sculley to be CEO of Apple in 1983. It was brotherly; they even finished each other's sentences. Jobs "resigned" two years later.

Jony doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who takes orders. Sam seems to be the kind of guy who gives orders. The question is, is Sam going to command the same kind of respect that Jony had for Steve, who definitely was the kind of guy who gave orders, sometimes loudly?

I’m thinking of this after watching the brotech video the two made to announce that OpenAI had acquired (or merged, whatever) for 2% of the stock of OpenAI. ($6.5B sounds like a big number, unless you measure it against the value of the whole company.) Jony was smart enough to keep his day job at LoveFrom, rather than becoming an employee of OpenAI, so perhaps he is hedging his bet.

If video had been a thing in 1983, you could imagine that Steve Jobs and John Sculley might have made a similar video showing how they finished each other’s sentences and were committed to changing the world by making transformational computer products. Instead, it turned out they didn’t get along all that well.

Did you know that Sam was the first investor in a company that makes an AI product that doesn’t have a screen and that is really intriguing as an AI companion? The sort of product that would fit the vision of io. Limitless isn’t shy about telling everyone that.

That company started as Rewind, which listened to your conversations on a computer and let you query those conversations. That was kind of a competitive space, particularly since video meeting software now does the same thing. Then the company realized that it would be better to listen to everything you said and was said around you by hanging a device around your neck. I’ve been using a Limitless Pendant for about a month, since April 20. The software records everything; indeed, the first day I put it on, it recorded me listening to a video of the co-founder & CEO of Limitless explaining what the Pendant does; another video I made of my grandniece finding Easter eggs; and an entire movie. (I was hanging out with myself while my wife was out, but the movie was interrupted by a conversation I had with her described as “After a tense and potentially violent interaction, the topic shifts to a discussion about food and accommodations”, according to the Limitless app.

Like any software company that decides to add hardware to the mix, the Limitless Pendant is painfully enticing. It just sounds so cool. The app lets you interrogate the recording with prompts like “Generate a todo list for next week” or “List my top 5 most important goals you heard”. Those are supplied prompts. I have asked it, “What commitments did I make in my meeting with Alice?” It integrates with Google Calendar, so it knew that I had coffee with Alice and gave me a list of the commitments I made to Alice. This is incredibly useful, since I forget to take notes and often also forget what I committed to do.

But… It could be so much smarter. Why doesn’t it integrate with IMDB to recognize that you’re watching a movie and just record the name of the movie and the time you spent watching it? (I can’t remember which movie I watched on April 20, other than that it involved a lot of violent action. I do love a good action movie!) Why can’t it use Gracenote to know when I’m listening to music, rather than record it? In other words, why isn’t it smart enough to know what to record in detail and what to summarize.

I’ve learned that the best way to use this product is to turn it off when you don’t need to remember. But, as soon as I do that, I forget to turn it back on. In other words, the product should know what I want to remember! That’s why I call it “painfully enticing”; it could be so much better a product than it is.

Back to Jony & Sam: Since Sam was the first investor in Limitless (since supplemented by First Round, Andreessen Horowitz and NEA), does the pendant hint at these amazing products that io/OpenAI are planning? (Indeed, I’d love to know if Sam had a hand in getting Rewind to become Limitless; if he did it might indicate that he has a product sense for hardware.)

Compare the Limitless Pendant to the Humane AI Pin. First, the founders of Humane were a couple that worked at Apple; co-founder Imran Choudri worked directly with Jony on multiple products. Once outside Apple, they invented a product that people really wanted to work but was largely considered over-designed and too expensive for its intended purpose. In other words, they weren’t able to adapt to life outside Apple. (How many ex-Apple people have started important new companies? I try to avoid investing in them, since Apple does not train for entrepreneurial skills.)

Do you think that perhaps Jony might have a similar issue, having worked inside the wonderland of product design for nearly 30 years, 20 of those years collaborating with the most esteemed product guy of the technology industry? Can he really be scrappy and product oriented when he is the preeminent designer of our age, used to the limitless (pun intended) resources of Apple and its culture?

And then Sam. Is he the same caliber as Steve Jobs? He’s an amazing guy, given what he’s accomplished. He has AI in his veins, and enough self confidence to piss off Elon Musk, his original board of directors, even Satya Nadella and plenty of other people. Maybe he even advised Rewind to pivot to the Limitless Pendant. Will he be content to wait until Jony feels the product is perfect?

Look, I know I’m being an asshole to express any skepticism about the bromance between Jony and Sam. I’ve never even met either one of them, so I’m sure that I don’t have a clue. But I do hope that OpenAI has a 5-year vesting period for Jony’s stock, just in case it doesn’t work out…