Caught without its own powerful LLMs, Apple's tried to make the best of the fait accompli of OpenAI's dominance, a senior analyst says
Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers remarks at the start of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California. Apple will announce plans to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) into Apple software and hardware.
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Think of the Faraday cage as a box that prevents any electromagnetic pinging of whatever’s inside the enclosure. It’s named after the 19th century English scientist Michael Faraday who demonstrated the physics involved.
Elon Musk, the world’s richest person as on June 11, used his favourite broadcast medium X to say he hates Apple’s new partnership with OpenAI so much that anyone visiting his companies will be expected to leave their iPhones in Faraday cages at the door.
That partnership, as was widely anticipated, was revealed at the opening of Apple’s annual developer jamboree, the Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC). The iPhone maker also announced a slew of other artificial intelligence (AI) features as it sought to answer the question in many people’s minds—from the common iPhone user on the street to the Wall Street financial analyst—as to what Apple had in store, after Google and Samsung and Microsoft had brought out a lot of their AI products.
Apple didn’t disappoint. And Musk’s angry posts could be written off as sour grapes, perhaps, as his new AI company xAI offers its own chatbot product, Grok, versus OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which Apple says will be “deeply integrated” into the iPhone and other products.
However, Musk’s comments also reflect the dire reality of the world’s biggest tech companies’ war to win the ongoing AI race. In some ways, Apple, as the planet’s biggest direct-to-consumer, hi-tech products company, has the most at stake with its privacy-first stance, which is part of its appeal.