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According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, Apple is in talks to invest in OpenAI, the generative AI company whose ChatGPT will be included in future versions of iOS.
If talks are successful, Apple will participate in a multi-billion dollar funding round led by Thrive Capital, which would value the startup at over $100 billion.
The report does not mention exactly how much Apple would invest, but it does point out that Apple will not be the only participant in this financing round. For example, further investments from Microsoft are expected, and Bloomberg reports that Nvidia is also considering a stake.
Microsoft has already invested $13 billion in OpenAI over the past five years and has placed OpenAI's GPT technology at the heart of most of its AI offerings in Windows, Office, Visual Studio, Bing and other products.
Apple, too, has integrated OpenAI's technology into its products – or at least will by the end of this year. At its 2024 developer conference earlier this summer, Apple announced a set of AI features called Apple Intelligence that will only work on the iPhone 15 Pro and later. However, compared to OpenAI's ChatGPT, Apple Intelligence has certain limitations and restrictions, so Apple has signed a deal to route user queries that are outside the scope of Apple Intelligence to ChatGPT in a future version of iOS 18 – similar to how Siri turns to Google to answer some user queries.
Apple plans to add support for other AI chatbots in the future, such as Google's Gemini, but Apple's software chief Craig Federighi said the company initially chose ChatGPT because “we wanted to start with the best.”
It's unclear what exactly Apple hopes to achieve with its investment in OpenAI, but a look at the company's similar past investments provides some clues. Apple typically invests in either suppliers or research teams that develop technologies to be used in future devices. For example, the company has invested in supply chain partners to build the infrastructure to make iPhones faster and more efficiently. The company has also invested $1 billion in the SoftBank Vision Fund to “accelerate the development of technologies that could be of strategic importance to Apple.”
ChatGPT integration is not expected to be included in the initial release of iOS 18 in September this year, but will likely be included in a smaller software update later in 2024.