Apple’s big WWDC keynote, for which Mac & i will, as usual, provide a live ticker, is just around the corner: next Monday, June 10, Apple will announce what the company has thought about AI from 7 p.m. Central European Time. Apparently, one of the main partners has now been decided: It is actually ChatGPT manufacturer OpenAI, which is actually closely associated with Microsoft. Reports to this effect have been circulating for weeks, but now, according to a Bloomberg article, a first contract is said to be in the bag. What’s interesting about this is that Apple wants to use generative AI make it subject to approvalthere will be an “opt-in”.
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Altman back on the show stage?
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, as a 23-year-old entrepreneur, had already been on a keynote stage: in 2008, one year after the iPhone was introduced, he showed in double polo look his location app Loopt (long since taken over and discontinued). 16 years later, the Silicon Valley manager could come to an Apple presentation again.
The idea seems to be that OpenAI needs Apple just as much as Apple needs OpenAI: The AI company wants the iPhone to be distributed with hundreds of millions of devices, and Apple needs support when it comes to large language models. The company has caught up recently, has made progress in on-device AI in particular, and is also planning its own secure AI data centers. But OpenAI’s models, such as the new GPT-4o, are still probably superior to Apple’s internal tools.
Free choice, also for China
That is why at least a “short to medium-term partnership” with OpenAI is planned, as Siri founder Dag Kittlaus said. Apple is also said to have been afraid that a chatbot would “freak out”. Some managers have a “philosophical aversion” to the technology. For this reason, generative AI in Apple systems is said to be entirely “by choice”.
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Altman (and his two Polos) introducing Loopt at an Apple event (Video: CNET/Apple)
By outsourcing the chatbot function, Apple can distance itself from the technology itself and not lose its reputation if GPT-4o hallucinates or gives false facts. It remains unclear what will happen to Siri: Apple’s voice assistant has been waiting for a major upgrade for a long time. Most recently, however, it was said that this was the heart of Apple’s AI strategy, but would probably not come until later, possibly not before 2025. Google, on the other hand, is apparently not out of the running either. Talks continued, but an agreement was reached with OpenAI beforehand. It is even conceivable that Apple will offer a range of third-party chatbots and then decide on a “case-by-case basis”. That would be suitable for China, for example, where ChatGPT is not available at all.
(bsc)