Apple Unveils Generative AI Tools, Partnership With OpenAI for ChatGPT

On Monday, Apple finally revealed a broad set of new AI-powered features coming to the Mac, iPhone, and iPad later this year. The most shocking revelation is that Apple is partnering with OpenAI to bring ChatGPT 4.0 to all its products for free, and you don’t even need an account to use it. In addition to the “global” knowledge ChatGPT brings to the table, it’ll also offer personalized, on-device AI assistance, which can utilize a new type of “private cloud” for requests that need more horsepower than a personal device can offer.

At WWDC this week, Apple showed a wide array of tasks that can be accomplished on its devices thanks to machine learning and large language models. The “new” features included AI-related tasks we can do now through other companies’ software, such as creating AI images (Midjourney, Bing, etc.) or getting help with writing (Microsoft Copilot, Grammarly). Still, they’ll be baked into every Apple device in future versions of its operating systems. This means you can generate a custom emoji of a person that looks like them—Apple calls this Genemoji—thanks to the context-aware nature of its built-in tools, as it can use their contact card for reference. At the same time, if someone texts you their address in Messages, you can just ask Siri to add it to their contact card.

The OS and Siri are now aware of everything that is stored on it and can fulfill requests such as those listed above.
Credit: Apple

Apple spent a great deal of time in its presentation emphasizing the importance of keeping your data secure, essentially saying if you’re using a cloud-based AI chatbot (like Microsoft Copilot or Google’s Gemini), all your data is going to their cloud, and thus you have no control over what happens to it. Apple says it’ll keep all your requests and data on-device, but if the AI determines the request needs more compute power, it’ll send it to new data centers specifically to handle these queries. This confirms earlier reports, and Apple says these data centers will provide a new feature it calls Private Cloud Compute. The company says your data won’t be stored on their servers, won’t talk to other outside servers or Apple, and that it’ll make the code publicly reviewable for safety concerns.

One new feature is it will prioritize notifications, so events happening sooner will be moved to the top of your summary.
Credit: Apple

Apple went through a litany of scenarios where its Apple Intelligence is contextually aware of what’s on your device and how it can improve your life. For example, if someone texts you about a meeting, it can tell you it’s conflicting with an appointment already on your calendar. Alternatively, you can ask when a person’s flight is landing, and it can dig up that person’s correspondence to let you know immediately. This contextual awareness also extends to photos where you can say, “Find me photos of so and so in Central Park.”

For queries that don’t rely on contextual awareness, such as your personal photos, contacts, calendar, and so forth, there’s ChatGPT for “global” requests, such as what a good recipe is or suggestions for vacation plans. This is a pretty big deal because OpenAI has been tied to the hip with Microsoft due to its $10 billion investment in OpenAI. It’s unclear how this deal unfolded, but it will catapult Apple into current times instead of having to build its own ChatGPT competitor, which could take years. ChatGPT is built right into Siri, so there’s no need to go back and forth between apps to use it. If you’re already a paying customer, you can add your account through your device.

ChatGPT is now baked into Siri in iOS and iPad OS18, and MacOS Sequoia.
Credit: Apple

Regarding privacy concerns, if you ask a query and the device realizes it needs ChatGPT, it will prompt the user to agree to share it with the service before sending the query to OpenAI. This should theoretically serve almost all of a person’s AI-assistance privacy needs, with on-device queries handled locally and kept on the device, the private cloud used for more complex requests, and ChatGPT for wide-ranging queries where the user has to opt-in for that to occur.

Apple says all these features and a lot more are coming this fall to the next versions of its operating systems, iOS and iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. These new features will not be locked behind some kind of hardware gate for iPhone users, as iOS 18 is supported back to the iPhone XR. You can watch Apple’s presentation in the Safari browser at this link.