It’s an obvious fact that many people, especially tech-savvy, wait for one of the major events all year long to see what’s next for innovation and upcoming trends – Apple’s WWDC. This year was particularly intriguing amid the AI hype that’s been growing since the introduction of ChatGPT by OpenAI.
Everyone was waiting for Apple’s answer to the current development and the possible alternative to ChatGPT and other models currently active in the market. Not only Apple didn’t announce a clear alternative but they confirmed the rumors – ChatGPT is coming to the iPhones.
Now, this is not new anymore, and the tech community has been discussing these changes for a while, and the opinions are divided of course. Although many people see this as an opportunity to empower their iPhone experience with smarter features, others feel like the security and safety bar Apple had established on a high level, is lowering.
Without getting into these details, we will discuss how the integration of ChatGPT can potentially make a big impact on the user experience positively, opening up new opportunities and solutions, and, why not, the possibility of new partnerships for Apple.
Embracing the changes and being an adopter is good
For the tech industry, changes and transformations are happening all the time, and in most cases, those are valuable for certain types of companies and businesses. Giant companies do their best to become important players in the field, but let’s be honest, there is no Everything company.
I remember Elon Musk here who was continuously talking about his plans to make X, previously Twitter, an everything app. In reality, it is almost impossible because you cannot be good at everything and customers would definitely go with more specialized offers.
This is one of the reasons why being an adopter as a company and integrating changes can be a great way to make better offers for customers. We can discuss the same issue with the example of online casino platforms that come from a very established industry but with a new format and methods.
The key to the success these platforms recorded was the integration of digital payments like Bitcoin, offering faster and more secure transactions. Today, Bitcoin casino websites are major players and tough competitors for land-based casinos, all thanks to the openness to partnerships and tech integration.
In the same way, when we talk about Apple’s decision to partner with OpenAI, it’s a little confusing to hear people’s concerns about it. Do you think Apple and its products can grow in isolation or partnerships?
Large Language Model platforms are a big deal
Long before the WWDC-24, there were tons of predictions circulating on the internet about the innovation Apple could introduce to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
On the contrary, Apple announced the release of Apple Intelligence which means several times smarter Siri and more flexible operations on the smartphone, but it’s far from being a competitor to the famous LLM platforms.
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Was this surprising? Probably yes, at least to some of the Apple fans. But with this decision, what Apple tried to say was that LLMs are a big deal, and not every company can just create its own model and release it to users.
Despite being time-consuming and an expensive luxury, LLMs also perform operations that cannot be done locally, in-device – something that Apple has been striving for for a better privacy experience. There are heavy tasks that LLMs need to use cloud-based solutions, which often may compromise data security.
Apple’s decision to do its best within the limits of in-device capabilities, and partner with LLM platforms for more complex tasks and inquiries, comes to prove the fact that these models are a big deal, absorbing billions of dollars of investments and can be more in demand in the future.
The new race to be the default choice
Bringing ChatGPT to the iPhones, Apple is basically opening up its gates to other LLM platforms too, such as Google’s Gemini. The rules are simple – if the user has inquiries requiring loading a LLM platform, they will give consent and get the results from one of the models, whether it’s ChatGPT, Gemini, or something else.
However, we can predict a clash for being the first choice by default. Let’s explain it.
When you search for something on Safari, you get the Google results, right? In other words, your browser is Safari but your search engine is Google. I would believe that many people had no idea that there is an option in configurations to change these settings from Google to Bing or DuckDuckGo, for instance.
The thing is that Google won a battle against other search engine platforms, by paying Apple around $20 billion annually just for being the primary search engine for the users of Apple products, from the iPhones to the Macs.
We can assume that there will be intense competition between LLM platforms for being the first choice by default. And the winner of these battles will be Apple again.
