Yesterday evening was particularly eventful if we are closely interested in artificial intelligence. During the WWDC 20204 conference, the Cupertino company presented Apple Intelligence, its in-house artificial intelligence technology, while announcing a partnership with OpenAI to natively integrate ChatGPT-4o, namely the latest version of the model, to all Apple devices.
Thus, with iOS 18, as soon as the user asks Siri a question, the voice assistant will ask permission to use ChatGPT in order to offer a more complete and detailed answer. On the other hand, OpenAI’s generative artificial intelligence tool will also be integrated into the applications: it will be possible to request its help in order to ask questions on various documents, write text or even rephrase sentences. This fundamental novelty in the approach to Apple services will be accessible on iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia.
Elon Musk does Elon Musk
Although this announcement was generally well received, it did not only make people happy. Always very verbose when it comes to artificial intelligence, billionaire Elon Musk took to X (formerly Twitter) to announce his dissatisfaction with Apple’s presentation. “ If Apple integrates OpenAI into its operating system, then all Apple devices will be banned in my companies. This is an unacceptable security breach » he was able to indicate on his own social network. Apple devices must therefore be left at the entrance to its companies, stored in a Faraday cage whose purpose is to block electromagnetic waves.
If we listen to Elon Musk, everything suggests that Apple has just offered OpenAI full access to its operating system. This would imply that the firm dedicated to artificial intelligence would be able to absorb data from users of Apple products. However, this is not the case: in essence, the native integration of ChatGPT with iOS does not change its operation in relation to the current application of artificial intelligence.
As it stands, OpenAI does not have access to any information: only questions transmitted manually (and after the user’s agreement) are transferred to OpenAI’s servers. Apple also warns with each question that ChatGPT’s answers may be false. And then, the integration of ChatGPT into Apple devices currently remains optional: the Cupertino company does not rule out integrating other language models to compete with GPT-4o, such as Google Gemini for example.
The American billionaire was not offended when Microsoft announced earlier in the year the integration of ChatGPT-4o into Copilot, Microsoft’s in-house AI tool. Following his logic, Windows affiliated devices should therefore be banned from his companies as well. As a reminder, Musk is one of the co-founders of OpenAi. He left the company in its infancy following fundamental disagreements with Sam Altman, the company’s current CEO.