I can't imagine Apple would make a deal that would allow a Third Party company to use Apple users' data for training. I would bet they'll either put it on-device, arrange the terms so that OpenAI cannot train on user data, or a mixture of both.

It's exceedingly likely that Apple would negotiate a self-hosted solution.

It would be interesting to see if they could acquire the required compute to handle iPhone scale.

Further so to see if it would be Nvidia GPUs (likely) or custom Apple Silicon (highly unlikely).

Why wouldn't they just train their own model? If Facebook can they can too.

They almost assuredly have and will continue to. But it may not be ready fast enough.

Putting an AI assistant in every Apple product (it would have to be ecosystem wide) is nowhere near the same use case as dropping a model like llama on the web and saying it’s for research only.

Apple has successfully leaned on other company’s services for core features (Google maps) and even then it took years and years to create a reasonably compelling first party, privacy preserving alternative.

The Vision Pro is the company’s most risky bet in some time releasing a product that is not quite there. Reporting is there was great rancor over whether to continue to wait.

The company is exceedingly conservative about major changes to how its consumer-facing products behave and releasing anything new that isn’t ready.

This is true inclusive of the VP (which I think was well baked), AirPower (which clearly was not) the original iCloud and a handful of other stand out miss-calculations and failures.

A deal with OpenAI provides leading edge expectations of today’s consumers for AI assist. So, they won’t lose ground while Apple works quietly in the background.

Instead the company can watch behavior, develop their idea for how it aught to be and build in the background on their own timeline.

It's a good approach given the company was caught as flat footed as everyone else.

That is very likely a longer term goal for Apple, but they want something ready to go this year and not to have a Google Gemini type half-baked launch.

As well as a scapegoat.

Ah, like how they did with China, allowing them to self host iCloud?

/s

That's why Microsoft is terrified.

They've kept this company propped up with billions in data-center expenses, fed it pipelines galore of data, and now johnny-come-lately shows up & reaps all the same reward. While not firehosing all their data back in.

Zero loyalty, zero benefit for Microsoft if this alliance they've spent out the ass for again and again starts partnering up with the direct competitor, who unlike them will retain all the data. But that's OpenAI!

Any company so brazenly willing to reneg on their not-for-profit mission, willing to completely two-facedly change themselves at a whim to chase profit: that should have been a sign. You should have known. Should have seen this coming.