According to a fresh Bloomberg story, Apple has begun talks with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, to power certain AI capabilities in iOS 18. Apple is also developing huge language models to power some iOS 18 capabilities, but its discussions with OpenAI are focused on a “chatbot/search component,” according to Bloomberg writer Mark Gurman.
Apple is also apparently in negotiations with Google about licensing Gemini, Google’s own AI-powered chatbot, for iOS 18. According to Bloomberg, those conversations are still ongoing, and things might still go either way because Apple has yet to decide which company’s technology to adopt. Gurman believes that Apple might eventually license AI technology from both businesses or none of them.
So far, Apple has been notably quiet about its AI efforts even as the rest of Silicon Valley has descended into an AI arms race. But it has dropped enough hints to indicate that it’s cooking up something. When the company announced its earnings in February, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple is continuing to work and invest in artificial intelligence and is “excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.” It claimed that the brand new M3 MacBook Air that it launched last month was the “world’s best consumer laptop for AI,” and will reportedly start releasing AI-centric laptops and desktops later this year. And earlier this week, Apple also released a handful of open-source large language models that are designed to run locally on devices rather than in the cloud.
It’s still unclear what Apple’s AI features in iPhones and other devices will look like. Generative AI is still notoriously unreliable and prone to making up answers. Recent AI-powered gadgets like the Humane Ai Pin released to disastrous reviews, while others like the Rabbit R1 have yet to prove themselves valuable.
