No Io

Hayden Field, for The Verge:

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware.

OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

Turns out that one of the hardest things in computer science still applies to our AI-driven world: naming things.

And really: “io” is such a common phrase in computing, it shouldn’t be able to be trademarked at all.