Apple is not paying OpenAI, because it believes that putting its technology in front of hundreds of millions of users is equal to or even better than any kind of monetary payment, according to Bloomberg.
Privacy protections are built in for users who access ChatGPT — their IP addresses are obscured, and OpenAI won’t store requests. ChatGPT’s data-use policies apply for users who choose to connect their account.
With the sheer amount of money that the rich are throwing at OpenAI via investment firms, they don’t need nor want to charge imo. The fact that they’re being built into Apple’s ecosystem and are getting name-dropped to people inside of iOS is kinda what their investors want.
It’s the age old “walmart opens and operates at a loss for 2 years to force others out of business, then jacks the price” model.
Investors want them to cement this as The AI company & brand so that once it gets giant and starts to be profitable just by being the biggest gorilla in the room, the shares they bought are worth more.
So what I’m trying to say is that our version of capitalism is perfect and makes lots of sense and is in no way insane and degenerate.
That might be their internal reasoning but Apple will very quickly move to have these capabilities in house. Apple has been working on machine learning for a while but they don't collect data so they are unable to build these LLMs.
For now it makes sense for Apple to leave the liability of basing these LLMs on copyrighted data. If OpenAI losses those court battles, they take the hit for services rendered to Apple. None of that liability transfers to Apple.
Meanwhile, Apple is going about this the Apple way by encouraging developers to integrate their apps into new frameworks being added. This gives them access to user data directly from the source allowing them to build personalized models.
These models will likely be far more useful to the day to day mundanity of life than the hallucinogenic encyclopedia that is ChatGPT.
I guess it deepened on what the onboarding flow looks like for newbies. The per-query alert is pretty minimal.
That said, my original point is that training data gathered from queries is probably not valuable enough to offset the costs of unpaid GP4 query compute for the biggest smart phone manufacturer on earth.
The data is valuable, but for GP4 access, OpenAI would rather scrape chat forums, sell integration licenses, or sell pro licenses to offset all those damn Nvidia chips.
OpenAI isn’t allowed to blindly scrape iPhone or iCloud user’s data. They can only learn from whatever data the user submits in a query. And Apple forces users to consent to every single query that is sent to OpenAI. And that query compute is expensive.
Given that Apple built in a way for GPT pro licenses to be used, my guess is that selling the subscriptions is the real business angle.
Open AI will get data from those queries, but since it’s a query, it requires significant compute. Paying for compute for the world’s largest smart phone manufacturer is going to hurt if they can’t monetize somehow.
I wonder how this will end up working. I want to use chat gpt without an account and while logged into a VPN and to have unlimited requests… would be nice if this was the solution to this.
It will be interesting to see the upgrade numbers in a year. Do most people not care about AI, or will the user base be wary? Current numbers show around 77% uptake on iOS 17.
My hot take is that the new iMessage features will push adoption rates really high. People in my household want the beta for that reason alone, and I’m having to bat them away because this is a buggy DB1.
A version is Siri that isn’t shit is also a big reason. But that is not coming until 18.1 or 2. So my money is on text effects and stupid emoji reactions being the initial upgrade driver.