According to Bloomberg, OpenAI has hired Paul Meade, who had been in charge of Apple Vision Pro and Apple’s smart glasses initiative. Here are the details.
OpenAI’s poaching of Apple designer continues
Last year, OpenAI announced it would join forces with Jony Ive and several LoveFrom designers to form io, a subsidiary that would release AI-first hardware.
Around the same time, news broke that OpenAI kept poaching current and former Apple designers and engineers, who were joining Ive’s team to develop AI-powered hardware. That includes longtime Ive collaborators Evans Hankey, who led Apple’s design for 3 years after Ive left, and Tang Ten.
Although things had been quiet on that front, Bloomberg reports that OpenAI has hired Pal Meade, Apple’s “top executive in charge of the Vision Pro headset and the company’s smart glasses efforts.”
Here’s Bloomberg:
Paul Meade, a vice president, is set to leave Apple by next week and will then start at OpenAI’s hardware unit, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Meade will work on OpenAI’s upcoming family of AI-powered devices, said the people, who declined to be named discussing unannounced personnel moves.
According to the report, Meade led the Apple Vision Pro hardware engineering team for seven years and had also been leading Apple’s efforts to develop its first smart glasses, which are now expected to be released in late 2027.
With Meade’s departure, many of his responsibilities as head of the Vision Products Group (VPG) will now fall to Fletcher Rothkopf, “his longtime deputy who is in charge of the product design function for the Vision Pro and smart glasses efforts,” Bloomberg says.
The report notes that before leading the VPG, Meade also worked as a “key iPad manager in 2010 before becoming head of iPhone program management in 2012,” before joining the VPG in 2017 and “taking over all hardware engineering in 2019.”
Finally, the report notes that Meade’s decision to leave was the result of the reshuffling that came from John Ternus’ appointment as Apple’s next CEO:
Apple chips boss Johny Srouji became chief hardware officer, replacing Ternus, and initiated a controversial shake-up of Apple’s hardware engineering unit in recent weeks. That led to a number of vice presidents under Ternus being given new roles and some executives feeling they had been demoted.
With Srouji taking over all hardware, Meade and several other hardware leaders now report to Tom Marieb, the new vice president of hardware engineering, rather than directly to Srouji. Marieb, in turn, reports to Srouji, effectively pushing many of those executives down a level in the organization.
To read Bloomberg’s full report, follow this link.
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