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It isn’t clear whether OpenAI would own a piece of the Ive-Altman venture, which The Information first reported on last fall, but such a scenario seems likely.

Spokespeople for Thrive and Emerson didn’t comment. SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son has been in talks with Altman and Ive since the company’s beginning, but the status of his involvement couldn’t be learned.

Emerson’s founder Laurene Powell Jobs is close personally to Altman and Ive, whom she has known for decades. Emerson Collective is a philanthropic organization and venture capital firm that has invested in payments provider Stripe, financial technology firm Chime and human resources software seller Gusto.

Some investors who aren’t in active talks with the new company cautioned that it could be difficult for some venture firms to back. With Ive and Altman attached, it is likely to draw a high initial price. And yet the company is incredibly young, with no product in an unproven category.

Building the AI device—which people in the discussions say wouldn’t look like a phone—would add to a dizzying array of projects Altman is pursuing beyond OpenAI. They included a separate company that would develop and manufacture server chips to power AI—possibly in competition with Nvidia. Altman has privately said OpenAI would likely own a piece of that firm and would be a customer of it.

The endeavor could put Ive in competition with his former company, Apple. Ive left Apple in 2019 and later started a design studio called LoveFrom, which worked for Apple for a time.

Many questions remain about Ive’s device company and its aims. Entrepreneurs are pursuing new hardware products to integrate with AI, trying to help users access chatbots and other apps while away from their screens. They include wearables like a pin by Humane—which has a camera, a microphone and speaker—and a device called the Rabbit designed to help users access services across apps. Altman is one of the largest investors in Humane.

OpenAI and other firms also are working on LLMs that could run on personal computers and other devices. And OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy has described large-language models, the conversational AI that powers OpenAI’s blockbuster product, ChatGPT, as a kind of operating system because of their ability to retrieve files, write code and run programs, and understand audio, images and human commands.

OpenAI, Google, Meta Platforms and other LLM developers are working to make their models better at recognizing images, drawings and hand gestures, not just language. The companies want to embed the technology in smart glasses and other wearable devices with forward-facing cameras.

That could bring about voice-enabled AI assistants reminiscent of those in sci-fi films such as “Her.” Such assistants would aim to be as transformative as the smartphone by doing a range of things not possible today. They could act as a tutor for a student working on a paper or on math problems, or give people information about their surroundings when they ask for it, such as translating signs or explaining how to fix car troubles.

OpenAI recently discussed embedding its object recognition software into products from Snapchat’s parent company, which could result in new features for Snap’s Spectacles smart glasses, The Information has reported.

After The Information's initial report on the Ive-Altman device venture, the Financial Times later reported that the pair was in talks to raise as much as $1 billion from SoftBank and that Son wanted Arm, a publicly traded chip design firm his company owns, to play a large role in the project.

Thrive recently led a purchase of up to $1 billion worth of OpenAI shares, including from employees, at a price that valued the company at $86 billion. A year earlier, Thrive bought a substantial amount of OpenAI shares at a price that valued it at about $27 billion. Thrive is also a large shareholder in Stripe and credit-card startup Ramp.