A day later, Jony Ive and Sam Altman kicked down the door and told Google, “Hold my beer.”

When Sam Altman first told ABC News in March 2023 that he and his OpenAI colleagues were “a little bit scared” of just how good the artificial intelligence (AI) systems they were unleashing are, it sounded like a cautious scientist’s plea for sober guardrails.

Well-funded and big-name partnerships often end in failure. And ex-Apple employees don’t have a great record of success.