Open AI and Apple deal: Apple's surrender?

Apple is supposedly getting into a deal with OpenAI. This deal will allow Apple to use OpenAI's technology to power Siri.

While this deal means OpenAI will now have two major tech companies as customers, previous one being Microsoft, Apple will finally upgrade their Siri, the voice agent which was way behind competition such as Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

But this deal reflects very poorly on Apple. Apple has always relied on creating its own ecosystem and refuse to even acknowledge that the non-Apple ecosystem existed. Apple allegedly tried making their own search engine and abandoned it in favor of signing deals with Google.

Apple tried to make Apple Maps as a competition to Google Maps, however it turned out to be an inferior product and Google Maps continue to be popular on Apple devices despite Apple Maps coming as default.

Apple's deal with Siri basically means Apple has admitted that it can not build OpenAI like technology in home. This is terrible news because with Apple's resources we could have hoped to have a fully vertically integrated AI ecosystem. Apple has already built its own chips, it could have built its own training and inference pipeline as well.

Microsoft despite its deal with OpenAI has clear intentions of building its own LLMs. It has also diversified by investing into other OpenAI competitors. On other hand Google has set very clear goals to go into this alone with their Gemini and associated suite of products. With Amazon, we do not yet know their strategy.

Apple did publish some data about their own internal efforts about LLMs. While it was not mind-blowing, it was pretty good. So no one predicted such a deal.

We also had rumors that Apple was talking to Google to use their Gemini in Apple products.

Conclusion

Apple's move does not inspire confidence in their AI initiatives. Outsourcing the AI to someone else is not really expected from large company like Apple.