Apple & OpenAI Partnership And Why Musk Is Against It

Apple has revealed a new partnership with OpenAI that will see new artificial intelligence-powered features included in their devices.

Apple executives including CEO Tim Cook unveiled ‘Apple Intelligence’ during a presentation at the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. “All this goes beyond artificial intelligence, and it is the next big step for Apple,” Apple CEO Tim Cook.

In response to these news, X owner and CEO, Elon Musk, has warned Apple users of security concerns that comes with this partnership. In his posts on X, Musk said that he’s concerned about Apple partnering with a third-party AI that it ‘doesn’t understand’ and ‘can’t themselves create’.

Musk also said that it’s ‘patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, but is capable of ensuring OpenAI will protect users’ security and privacy. He further said that if Apple integrates OpenAI at the Operating System level (OS), then Apple devices will be banned at his companies.

“And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” Musk wrote.

What Apple Promises

Apple CEO Tim Cook, said that this partnership goes beyond artificial intelligence to what he termed as ‘personal intelligence’, the next big step for Apple. The iPhone maker has revealed a slew of new artificial intelligence-powered features backed by the partnership with OpenAI.

The upgrades include an overhaul of the virtual assistant Siri, which will be capable of hundreds of more tasks with the help of ChatGPT. Apple users will also be able to create their own emojis based on language prompts and generate summaries of emails in the mailbox via the tech giant’s in-house technology.

Apple signalled that the company would differentiate itself from rivals Microsoft and Google by putting privacy “at the core” of AI, which is known for hoovering vast amounts of data.

Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, said that “Apple Intelligence” puts AI models “right at the core of your iPhone, iPad and Mac” and “protects your privacy at every step”.

The upgrades will be available for free in Apple’s iOS 18 operating system, due for release later this year, although the full suite of features will only work on more recent models of the iPhone, iPad and Macbook.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a social media post that he was “very happy” to be partnering with Apple to integrate ChatGPT into its products.