When it finally happened, Silicon Valley’s hottest and most telegraphed partnership was announced so quickly that the crowd at Apple’s Cupertino headquarters barely had time to cheer it.
Anyone expecting OpenAI’s Sam Altman, one of the key players in the generative artificial intelligence fever sweeping the tech sector, to join Tim Cook onstage at Apple’s annual developer event for an iconic photo opportunity will be disappointed.
The focus of Apple’s event on Monday was exactly that: Apple. And the message was that the collaboration with OpenAI was just the first of many.
Apple’s argument to investors who worry it is falling behind the technology is that if the first wave of generative AI involved artificial intelligence that understands the broader world, the iPhone maker is uniquely positioned to deliver generative AI. Offer AI that understands you.
That means Apple’s own generative AI models received top billing. “Apple Intelligence” is the tech giant’s collective name for a series of models, built and trained by Apple, that will be embedded in the new operating systems iOS 18, iPadOS18 and macOS Sequoia.
The company hasn’t built generative models of the complexity and scale offered by competitors. Instead, it has chosen to act as a gateway to other products on the market that can do things Apple can’t. The fundamental model on the device has 3 billion parameters. OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Google’s Gemini Pro are estimated to have over a trillion.
“It doesn’t surprise me [that Apple focused on its own solutions] because they want to emphasize that they are in control,” says Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management. There is, he said, a “light-year gap” between the capabilities of their model and OpenAI’s, and “they’re not going to play that part out.”
Neither Apple nor OpenAI would say whether the partnership involved either paying the other in the same way Google pays Apple about $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on the iPhone maker’s devices.
“We know there are other models out there, and some of them have really fantastic knowledge of the world,” said Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software, after the keynote presentation. Apple, he said, is simply starting with the best and is already eyeing a new deal with Google, through Gemini.
But even as Apple focuses on its own solutions, a cultural shift is still underway, Munster said. “At its core, Apple’s AI is in someone else’s hands,” he said. “They have never gone to a third party to license a core technology.” The company’s long-standing search partnership with Google, he said, is about an on-device feature, while AI is “more of an operating system.”
Apple is playing up its traditional differentiator. It says its on-device models deliver privacy and security benefits, and emphasizes that any personal data used to train its own AI models will remain within its ecosystem. These will run on the device as much as possible. Where they do need to use the cloud, the queries go to servers owned and operated by Apple. The idea is that users don’t even notice what is being used.
The features this enables, such as custom emojis, smart photo editing that allows users to seamlessly remove unwanted people or objects from photos, writing and drawing assistants, and a smarter Siri capable of greater contextual awareness and interaction with both Apple’s apps and third party apps are incremental. The idea is that the iPhone and its productivity features will get smarter over time as the hardware becomes more powerful and Apple’s own models catch up.
In the meantime, ChatGPT will be tasked with handling more complex queries sent to Siri. This could, for example, involve sending a photo of an ingredient that OpenAI’s models can identify and recommend recipes for. It will also be integrated into Apple’s writing tools.
Users are not forced to use the feature and will be notified by Siri before doing so. OpenAI, meanwhile, promises “built-in” privacy protections every time Siri pings ChatGPT. Requests are not stored – which could allow a third party to develop a profile of a user – and users’ IP addresses are made invisible. Users can choose to link their ChatGPT account, which means ChatGPT data policies will then apply.
The move still had Tesla CEO and X owner Elon Musk infuriated. About He said he would ban Apple devices from his companies if OpenAI were integrated with them, calling it “an unacceptable security breach.”
If anything, Musk’s intervention reflected the intense scrutiny that AI partnerships in Big Tech face, with regulators vowing to intervene to tackle concentrations of power.
If users want Apple’s new features, they will have to use Apple’s latest and most powerful iPhones – the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max – powered by the latest A17 Pro chip. For laptops and tablets, the features will run on devices equipped with the M-series chips, which date back to 2020.
As iPhone users hang on to older models longer, the demand that even smaller generative models place on aging hardware creates an incentive for them to upgrade. The iPhone 16, expected later this year, now seems primed for a heavy marketing campaign highlighting its generative AI features.
Francisco Jeronimo, vice president of data and analytics at the IDC research group, said the event “marked the beginning of a new era for Apple and for their users,” with Apple positioning itself to benefit from a future “super cycle” of the sales of appliances. it is moving to new “intelligent devices”.