Member-only story
Apple & OpenAI: Profit Heaven…For Now
Apple’s deal with OpenAI is perfect for both parties, for now
In the past week or so, I have written about my concerns over Apple Intelligence and its potential impact on user creativity. In this post, I want to deep dive into potential profit motives for both Apple and OpenAI to enter into their partnership and to explore how the deal plays out.
If you didn’t know already, Apple announced a deep integration of AI features into its operating systems at WWDC. While Apple has its own brand of AI product that it calls ‘Apple Intelligence’, the company also offers an integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. To quote Apple, ChatGPT is ‘seamlessly integrated’ into Apple’s services: meaning users can invoke it whenever they need information that Apple’s own services cannot provide.
Since the WWDC keynote where these features were unveiled, it has become clear that Apple isn’t paying OpenAI for ChatGPT. According to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, ‘Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments’. Likewise, OpenAI isn’t paying anything to receive such prominent product placement in…