Apple Isn’t Paying Anything to add ChatGPT to iOS 18
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One of the significant new features Apple announced this week for iOS 18 and the rest of this year’s software updates is tight integration with the popular ChatGPT chatbot. That’s thanks to a partnership Apple forged with ChatGPT — a deal that it turns out won’t cost Apple a dime.
Although Apple has been in talks with OpenAI for over a year, news that the two companies were on the verge of a deal broke last month. Most analysts expected we’d see ChatGPT featured prominently during Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. Still, no one was quite sure how it would fit in or what the specific arrangements were between the two companies. It wasn’t even clear who would be paying whom here.
Now, it turns out that the terms of the deal are based purely on goodwill — in the business sense rather than the spiritual one. According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Apple will be “paying” OpenAI instead by putting its technology on hundreds of millions of devices.
Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the deal terms are private. Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments, these people said.Mark Gurman
That’s an understandable win for the AI company, especially since Apple is using the ChatGPT branding for those aspects of its new Apple Intelligence platform that will call upon the chatbot. ChatGPT will be front and center as the platform that helps Siri with questions it can’t answer on its own. There’s also the possibility that OpenAI could gain more paying ChatGPT subscribers since, although the service will be available to Apple users for free, the integration will also work with paid accounts to provide more advanced features like data analysis and expanded image generation.
What’s in it for Apple is a bit more obvious. One of Siri’s weakest areas has been answering general knowledge questions. It’s one area in which Apple is still behind in the AI arms race, as it requires training large language models (LLMs) on vast amounts of data. Apple is actively working on that, but ChatGPT will fill the gap in the meantime.
How ChatGPT Fits Into iOS 18
To be clear, ChatGPT is not at the core of the new Apple Intelligence features. It’s strictly an add-on that offers a broader scope.
Nearly everything Apple showed off during the Apple Intelligence portion of its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) Keynote this week is powered by Apple’s generative AI technologies and LLMs and won’t touch ChatGPT or OpenAI’s servers at all. In fact, most of it will never leave your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
For example, normal requests to Siri will continue to be processed on-device, as they have been since iOS 15, at least on iPhones with the necessary processing power. That’s why the more sophisticated Siri will only run on the iPhone 15 Pro and newer models, as well as iPads and Macs with M-series chips — only these have the necessary horsepower and RAM to handle the more advanced language models.
Apple Intelligence will also offer features to improve your writing, such as proofreading, changing the tone of paragraphs of text, and automatically crafting replies to emails and messages. Summaries will be available for long-form articles and even transcribed voice recordings from Apple Notes and phone calls. There will also be features to summarize and prioritize notifications and emails so you can more easily see what they’re about without opening them.
Apple Intelligence (not ChatGPT) will also power image generation through new Genmoji and Image Playground features, letting users create new emojis and other images on the fly, plus image editing enhancements in the Photos app.
All of that is 100% Apple technology. While there are times your device may need to ask a cloud server for help, that will be a secure server built and controlled by Apple as part of its private cloud computing infrastructure. It’s also designed so that only the specific pieces of data that require extra computing power will be sent to the cloud, so as much of your information as possible will remain on your device, and what does land on Apple’s cloud servers will be handled anonymously and retained for no longer than needed to process your request.
The only place where ChatGPT comes in is when you ask Siri a question that it can’t answer without turning to a broader knowledge base. Rather than trying to teach Siri to scour Google, Apple has welcomed OpenAI into the fold to fill in the gap.
For instance, asking Siri to summarize your emails or tell you the weather won’t involve ChatGPT. Asking Siri to help you prepare a five-course meal or make decor recommendations from a photo (two examples shown by Apple) will reach out to a chatbot that’s far more qualified to answer those questions.
However, Siri will never contact ChatGPT without first asking your permission, and if any other data needs to be shared with ChatGPT (such as a photo in the example above), it will make sure you’re okay with sharing that as well.
You’re in control over when ChatGPT is used and will be asked before any of your information is shared. Craig Federighi, Apple Senior VP of Software Engineering
ChatGPT is similarly integrated into the systemwide writing tools as an additional option to supplement Apple Intelligence. Here, it shows up as a “Compose” button that you’ll click to type in a request to the chatbot, similar to what you’d enter directly into the ChatGPT app.
Even though ChatGPT requests are offloaded to OpenAI’s servers, the tighter integration is still considered part of Apple Intelligence. It will, therefore, only be available on those devices that support the full suite of Apple’s generative AI features — the iPhone 15 Pro, iPhone 15 Pro Max, and M-series iPads and Macs. Of course, those with older devices can still install the ChatGPT app and integrate it with Siri through a shortcut; they just won’t be able to have Siri automatically offer to hand off requests to ChatGPT.
