Who wants money? Apple is paying OpenAI in publicity for ChatGPT integration

Apple introduced new ChatGPT integrations for the iPhone, Mac, and Siri at WWDC 2024 earlier this week. Nevertheless, the corporate didn’t expose any specifics about its cope with OpenAI. As an alternative, more often than not on stage was spent assuring customers they’d have full management over what data is shared with the chatbot. In contrast to the ChatGPT smartphone app, for instance, the Apple integration gained’t retailer conversations and even customers’ IP addresses.

Now, it seems that ChatGPT creator OpenAI isn’t getting paid to course of queries on Apple’s units both. In accordance with Bloomberg, sources aware of the deal say the partnership isn’t anticipated to make both firm a lot cash.

As an alternative, Apple believes that the publicity generated by the ChatGPT integration is price greater than a one-time or recurring fee to OpenAI. Alternatively, the iPhone maker not directly advantages by providing a greater Siri expertise to customers. Nevertheless, that doesn’t imply neither firm stands to learn in financial phrases.

Apple will use its personal “basis” fashions to energy the vast majority of upcoming AI options throughout its platforms. And based on not too long ago revealed benchmarks, the server AI mannequin is about pretty much as good and even barely higher than GPT-3.5 — the bottom possibility obtainable to all OpenAI customers. Nevertheless, Apple’s finest mannequin pales compared to GPT-4o, which is the present most suitable choice obtainable to ChatGPT Plus customers.

When the overhauled Siri is launched later this 12 months, it is going to provide to ahead sure consumer inquiries to ChatGPT. The hope is probably going that sufficient customers will see the utility of ChatGPT’s increased response high quality and find yourself paying for limitless entry to GPT-4o and different paid options. The subscription prices $20 per consumer per thirty days.

Moreover, if a consumer decides to improve to ChatGPT Plus through Apple’s fee processing system, the corporate will get a reduce of the acquisition.

ChatGPT runs on Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, the place OpenAI probably enjoys discounted compute charges. With over $13 billion in cumulative funding up to now, Microsoft is the startup’s largest stakeholder.

Nonetheless, even probably the most conservative estimates say that each single ChatGPT question prices OpenAI a couple of cents’ price of computational energy. The precise quantity relies on the variety of tokens generated by the chatbot, which loosely corresponds to output size. We all know that ChatGPT’s smartphone apps are designed to ship shorter responses, so the corporate may use the identical technique to maintain prices below management when the iPhone integration goes stay. And fortuitously, solely a subset of Siri queries get handed on to ChatGPT, which ought to additional alleviate the load.