Sky Acquired by OpenAI
We will bring Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, and all members of the team will join OpenAI.
I’m not surprised by this development at all. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity have all been developing features similar to what Sky could do for a while now. In addition, Sam Altman was an investor in Software Applications Incorporated, the company behind Sky.
That includes SAI co-founders Ari Weinstein (CEO), Conrad Kramer (CTO), and Kim Beverett (Product Lead)—all of whom worked together for several years at Apple after Apple acquired Weinstein and Kramer’s previous company, which produced an automation tool called Workflows, to integrate Shortcuts across Apple’s software platforms.
The three SAI founders left Apple to work on Sky, which leverages Apple APIs and accessibility features to provide context about what’s on screen to a large language model; the LLM takes plain language user commands and executes them across multiple applications. At its best, the tool aimed to be a bit like Shortcuts, but with no setup, generating workflows on the fly based on user prompts.
Well, guess what: OpenAI did what Apple should have done and acquired them.
[…]
At the time it was announced I ranted on about how Apple had managed to mis-manage this kind of talent and vision for Mac automation so badly that they ended up leaving the company and not having any of what they showed at the time incorporated in Apple Intelligence, and I am sticking to my guns on that one[…]
OpenAI’s Sky acquisition comes just a day after OpenAI announced ChatGPT Atlas, a new browser that’s designed to compete with Safari and Chrome.
It’s a chatbot.
It’s a browser.
It’s an OS.Are you getting it yet @Apple?
Previously:
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The people who ruined Mac automation for users, by distracting Apple from Automator with the programmer-centric Shortcuts, before taking the Apple money and running, threatened to distract Apple from the entire premise of human-actionable user interface (granted they're well down that route already), with their "what I really want is a human slave" AI system.
Thankfully, OpenAI have done the first good thing in their entire history, and saved Mac users from Apple owning it.
What @Someone said. I hate Shortcuts more than any piece of software Apple has ever made, and I’m perfectly happy for history not to repeat itself.
This is something that should be at the OS level and with full-scale privacy protections.
So something really only Apple can do well.
While a neat demo, but big risks when some AI can access anything on your screen and do things on your behalf.
