Why OpenAI most likely paid Apple and will be the clear winner in the new Apple Intelligence play
Some nuances and some thoughts
I watched Apple's Event yesterday evening and was quite impressed with what was demoed. One thing in particular, caught my eye and apparently Elon Musk’s.
And chaos ensued.
Apple is making OpenAI deeply integrated, the details of which you can read in this article.
The gist of the announcement is that Apple will use LLM in device (most likely their proprietary model) with their own cloud and supplement that with ChatGPT.
How does OpenAI win here?
OpenAI wasn't Apple’s first pick. But it was the one it needed to pick. Apple reportedly went to Google which didn't go well and OpenAI was chosen as the partner. That makes sense. Google is already paying Apple billions to be the default search engine. Why would Google pay more money to improve something (Gemini) that it hopes will die down soon so it's core model stays intact?
Yes, I believe OpenAI is paying Apple for the privilege of being embedded in Apple's software. Here's why:
OpenAI needs data to train it's LLM. Even though its anonymous, it's good to train their ChatGPT model.
OpenAI gets to increase 14x it's user base overnight: Right now there's close to 150 million daily users for ChatGPT. That's good but but that great for a groundbreaking product. With this deal, number of users will increase, making ChatGPT ever so popular, even allowing iOS users to link their paid ChatGPT subscriptions to their device.
Apple gets cash and OpenAI needs to pay up: If you look at precious partnerships that went well, look at Dropbox with Samsung where partnerships with Samsung made Dropbox into a cloud storage behemoth within days. Acquiring a customer takes money and time. OpenAI only needs to pay money and they get new users and with that their data within a short amount of time.
What's next?
OpenAI can be a clear threat to Google's business by building a ChatGPT version that hallucinatates less and produces more meaningful data.