AI in practice

Apple and OpenAI plan major announcement at WWDC

Matthias Bastian
Apple's ChatGPT deal with OpenAI is said to be as good as secure

Midjourney prompted by THE DECODER

Apple and OpenAI are planning a major joint announcement at WWDC, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman in his latest newsletter.

The two companies have reached an agreement to integrate OpenAI's technology into iOS 18. OpenAI is currently working to provide the necessary capacity for the expected influx of users, Gurman reports.

Apple has focused primarily on local AI capabilities, but it also wants to offer cloud services and is upgrading its data centers to do so. Plans include improvements to Siri, automatic summaries of notifications and news articles, and transcription of voice memos.

Gurman says Apple does not yet have its own chatbot like ChatGPT or Google Gemini, even though the company knows users expect such a feature. Executives have also admitted internally that Apple is behind the curve in AI.

For now, Apple believes its own AI models combined with OpenAI are sufficient, though the agreement is not seen as a long-term solution, according to the report.

There is still no agreement with Google on integrating Gemini, and discussions are ongoing, Gurman reports.

Apple could also revisit the search engine issue. However, Google pays Apple about $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on Apple devices.

Apple would have to make that amount of money on its own search engine to make it economically viable. In addition, generative AI search is neither technically nor legally ready.

Google's broader rollout of AI-generated search results with the "Search Generative Experience" demonstrates this. The AI results are flawed, and site owners reject them because they reduce traffic.