Apple seems to have persuaded OpenAI to work for exposure

At Apple’s recently concluded annual conference for developers, the company announced that it teamed up with OpenAI to bring its technology to the iPhone and its other devices. It’s easy to imagine a huge amount of money changing hands in a deal between a massive corporation and a fast-rising tech firm. But according to a new Bloomberg report, nobody paid anybody in that partnership. Apple is reportedly not paying OpenAI, because it believes that putting its technology in front of hundreds of millions of users is equal to or even better than any kind of monetary payment.

Apple will use OpenAI’s GPT-4o model to power AI tasks on iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia. Siri, for instance, will tap into ChatGPT’s capabilities if users ask it to create menu ideas, to summarize articles or to find photos based on a description of what they contain. Apple’s writing tools can also use ChatGPT to write stories, as well as to rewrite and proofread existing text. Users will be able to enjoy these features without having to log into or pay for ChatGPT, but they do get access to extra perks if they pay for a Plus account.

As Bloomberg points out, OpenAI could make money from the deal by convincing Apple users to pay $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus. And if those users sign up on an Apple device, then the iPhone-maker will also get a commission. In the future, Apple intends to generate more earnings from AI by getting into revenue-sharing agreements with its partners, the news organization says. It’s aiming to get a cut of what those partners will earn from monetizing results in chatbots on Apple’s operating systems, in particular, because it believes more and more users will turn to AI over search engines. That means it could earn less money from its long-standing (and lucrative) search deal with Google.

Apple has yet to reveal its future AI partners, but it’s reportedly in talks with Google to offer Gemini integration to iOS users as soon as later this year. It’s also reportedly talking to Anthropic to offer its Claude AI chatbot as another option.