OpenAI has acquired yet another company – this time, a startup called Software Applications Inc, known for building an AI-powered user interface for Mac computers. Although OpenAI has acquired several companies over the past few months, the acquisition of Software Applications comes at a time when the company is making its ChatGPT AI bot into everything app and also getting into the AI hardware space.
Founded in 2023, Software Applications was started by a group of former Apple employees. Weinstein was one of the creators of the iOS automation app Workflow, which was acquired by Apple in 2017. After the acquisition, Weinstein and Kramer joined Apple, where they helped develop the technology behind the iPhone’s Shortcuts app (also available on macOS and iPadOS), a deeply integrated automation tool that powers everything from Automations on the Mac to the Action button on the latest iPhone models.
Meanwhile, Beverett worked at Apple for 10 years, focusing on Safari, WebKit, Privacy, Messages, Mail, Phone, FaceTime, and SharePlay, and presented at the company’s WWDC conference twice, according to her LinkedIn profile.
Kramer left Apple in 2019, and Weinstein and Beverett followed in 2023. The former Apple engineers then founded a new company and began working on Sky, a Mac-based natural language AI assistant designed to answer questions and complete tasks within any open Mac window.
Software Applications is a relatively new startup. However, the company has already raised $6.5 million and is backed by Silicon Valley investors, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Figma CEO Dylan Field.
The question is: what will OpenAI do with its acquisition of a small company called Sky and its 12-member team? Terms of the deal weren’t disclosed. However, the acquisition suggests that the ChatGPT maker aims to improve how AI tools function on computers.
Over the past few months, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and his team have continued to emphasize the broader vision behind ChatGPT – transforming it from an AI chatbot into an “everything app.” That vision is already starting to take shape. The San Francisco–based company is using ChatGPT to add more features and services. One example is the new Atlas browser, which looks and feels similar to existing browsers but is built around OpenAI’s generative chatbot, ChatGPT. The company also plans to launch a marketplace where developers and non-technical users can create custom functions for the chatbot.
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OpenAI can be difficult to understand at first, but many insiders believe it has the potential to become the next Apple in terms of scale and influence. The company is already valued at around $500 billion, making it possibly the fastest-growing tech firm ever – and perhaps the most valuable startup in history.
OpenAI is an unconventional tech company, yet it’s also taking cues from traditional tech giants like Apple and Google, whose growth trajectories share striking similarities.
With ChatGPT at the center of everything and each new service becoming part of the same interface, the front end that users interact with, the Sky deal is another way to experience the AI chatbot and improve how it works with Apple’s Mac computers. OpenAI says it plans to bring Sky’s deep macOS integration into ChatGPT.
“Sky’s deep integration with the Mac accelerates our vision of bringing AI directly into the tools people use every day,” Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, said in a statement.
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What OpenAI really wants to do in AI and what Sky’s team is working on seem to be aligned. Sky essentially allows Mac users to use natural language prompts to get help with writing, coding, planning, and managing their days. Simply put, Sky can take actions through apps and understands what’s on a user’s screen. In fact, in an interview with The Verge earlier this year, Software Applications’ team outlined an ambition for how generative AI could shape computing, aiming to give users more control, similar to what existed in the early days of personal computers.
If we dig more deeply into how and why Software Applications is bringing AI to the desktop with Sky and what prompted OpenAI to acquire them, one wonders how the deal benefits the world’s most valuable startup, especially since the company recently announced Atlas, a new browser designed to compete with Safari and Chrome. The timing makes the deal even more interesting. Not only does Atlas integrate directly with ChatGPT, but the browser also includes features like a sidebar window that allows users to ask ChatGPT questions about the web pages they visit, as well as an AI agent that can click around and complete tasks on a user’s behalf.
It all starts to make sense what Sky, as a product, brings to the table. After all, all modern computing platforms, like Macs and PCs, are inefficient in handling tasks that should be simple. Think about how often do we find ourselves performing exactly the kind of repetitive tasks that computers were meant to do for us?
Beefing up ChatGPT and the Atlas browser with a product like Sky makes a lot of sense. But the acquisition also raises questions about why OpenAI seems keen on bringing former Apple employees on board. Earlier, OpenAI acquired Jony Ive’s AI startup, the former Apple industrial designer who was behind the iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and other Apple hit products. The deal, valued at about $6.4 billion in an all-equity transaction, pushes the artificial intelligence company into the hardware business.
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Apple, as a company with the best engineering talent and world-class software and hardware products, serves as a blueprint for what OpenAI aspires to be. We don’t know what Altman and Ive are developing together but the former star Apple designer has been indicating the company is developing a “family of devices.”
“I don’t think we have an easy relationship with our technology at the moment,” the former Apple designer said at OpenAI’s developer conference in San Francisco earlier this month.
OpenAI may have one of the best tech products in the world – ChatGPT, which has more than 800 million weekly users but the company still needs a hardware device, like the iPhone did for Apple or Ray-Ban glasses did for Meta, to develop the interface of the future. It’s not going to be a smartphone or a traditional computer, but something else. We don’t yet know what that might be, but a physical device is necessary for OpenAI to play a dominant role in the lives of billions of people.
