Apple and OpenAI allegedly reach deal ahead of WWDC

Perhaps against the wishes of Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea, Apple and OpenAI have reportedly reached a deal that will bring ChatGPT to iOS 18 and other operating systems in 2024.

Apple wants to bring AI to its platforms, but it has focused on privacy-preserving on-device models and not the Large Language Models (LLMs) used by its competitors. So, the company has been seeking a partnership with Google or Microsoft to bring their LLMs to iPhone.

According to a report, a deal has finally been struck between OpenAI and Apple. The details of the deal aren’t known, but it likely means technologies used for ChatGPT could be accessible by Apple users, namely through Siri.

A deal with OpenAI doesn’t close out options with other AI industry players. One rumor suggested Apple was looking to create an AI App Store, so OpenAI could be one of several companies populating such a store.

Internal politics are the likely driver of this compromise, as the report shared that Apple’s Senior Vice President Machine Learning and AI Strategy, John Giannandrea, said in an email in 2023 that “the last thing people needed was another chatbot.” So, either Apple didn’t bother with a server-side LLM or they started too late and it isn’t ready.

Whatever the case, if this report is true, Apple likely won’t be announcing an Apple-made LLM to replace Siri. Instead, it will use server-side products like ChatGPT to answer user questions.

For example, today if you ask Siri something that would require a search, Siri sends a search query to Google using an anonymous identifier. OpenAI could have a similar option for users where queries requiring AI would pass information to ChatGPT in a privacy-preserving way and return a useful answer read by Siri.

The WWDC keynote where everything will be revealed is on June 10. Stay tuned to AppleInsider as we continue to break exclusive leaks surrounding iOS 18 and AI.