Apple is reportedly not investing in OpenAI
Apple is said to have dropped out of a new funding round for OpenAI at the last minute, but this will have no impact on its plans to integrate optional ChatGPT queries into Apple Intelligence.
Apple has decided not to invest money into OpenAI at present.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is closing a funding round that is expected to raise a $6.5 billion, that was previously expected to be funded in part by Apple. Other tech giants Microsoft and Nvidia are among those expected to participate in the new funding drive. Microsoft is expected to add another $1 billion to the $13 billion it has already invested.
The report isn't clear as to why Apple isn't investing into the funding round.
While rare, it's not unheard of for Apple to invest in other tech firms and promising startups. The company set up a $430 billion Advanced Manufacturing Fund to invest in companies that help provide it with new technology, such as optical technology firm II-VI.
Another example of this is Finisar, a US-based company that provides some of the technology behind FaceID and Portrait Mode that Apple later acquired outright. Apple has also invested in Globalstar, which provides the infrastructure that makes the Emergency SOS via satellite possible.
Changes at OpenAI
The pullout by Apple could be related to the recent move by OpenAI to abandon its nonprofit status and become a for-profit company. The changeover will be complicated, and if OpenAI doesn't complete the transition within two years, investors in the current round may ask to have their investment money returned.
Apple's reported withdrawal from the funding round is not expected to have any effect on the company's current relationship with OpenAI. ChatGPT will continue to be an optional feature in Apple Intelligence as it rolls out across late 2024 and early 2025.
As Apple has noted, users will have the option of having queries answered by ChatGPT if the nature of the request is beyond Siri's knowledge base. The integration will allow users to access ChatGPT knowledge without having to create an account, though existing subscribers can integrate their paid features within those experiences.
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Then Apple poured billions into a mixed reality headset that has no mass market appeal. Whoops. It's not even a price issue. The Apple Vision Pro is the best out there but like the WSJ said, it's a beautiful device but no one wants it.
And the next crazy thing is AI. Like the Y2K hysteria. Much ado about nothing. Airplane hangers full of old discarded data being mined by algorithms to generate useful data. Haven't we done this nonsense before under a different name: Data Warehousing?
To have true AI you will need to mine realtime data not old junk.
Apple wisely decided that wasted billions on Apple Car and Vision Pro was enough of Google Moon Shots. Apple is focused on making money. Lots of it. So the next Apple venture will be on a money making potential not another moon shot.
This is why I won't shed many tears when and if OpenAI finally goes under. There was so much promise with their creation. But they've not done anything I can see to show it's worthy of sticking around when the funds run dry. Let a better company come along and do an actual good job on AI for once. Whether that can be Apple or not is yet to be seen. Apple did come out with Apple Maps despite the global love for Google Maps, so you never know. They may release their own ChatGPT style AI chatbot one day, with true intelligence that doesn't lie and gives working URLs.
Apple will be partnering with both Open AI and Google to empower Apple Intelligence Visual Search, a feature very similar to Google Lens.
Coming later next year.
My past experience with Bing integration of ChatGPT has been mixed. Yesterday, when I told it to give me a summary of 10 paragraphs or less of the new book by Melania Trump, it responded stupidly about not being able to comply with any request pertaining to politics. When I said the book didn't have to do with that, it regurgitated the same text. I did a back-and-forth with it until it suggested we end that topic. Infuriating!
But for the sake of doing something new, I followed your link and tested all 4 chatbots using this text:
Copy/Paste that line of text yourself in your chosen chatbot on DuckDuckGo and you'll find that two of the bots give the same URL to the New York Times, to a web page that doesn't exist. Another said it couldn't help me. Another one told me to find it myself. Crazy!
All said, it doesn't matter to me if the current broken AI functionality gets fixed by 2030. I want it to do BASIC STUFF today. But it can't even do that. And before anybody stupidly chastises me for having asked about a "vintage" news article, I've asked about many different things that are current or from a few years ago, and all the URLs provided to me lead to the correct domain, but to a non-existent web page. That was the entire point of my previous post, and that point remains loud and clear.
With that said, I do use ChatGPT4o directly each day, and I know from experience that it does in fact search the web. I realize that other Chatbots do not, but ChatGPT4o (the key being "4o") does. It has told me it would prefer if I tell it more specifically with "search the web for..." or "browse the web for..." commands. Even if I do everything perfectly though, and even though I see it thinking out loud "searching the web..." it always returns with a URL that yields a 404 (right domain, but missing article, even on things published online YEARS ago). So this is a real world flaw that I am calling out here, and that stands true even if others come along and say they use ChatGPT4o differently. A flaw is a flaw that ultimately needs to be fixed.
I really do hope AI chatbots improve over time. And I hope they do that quickly, not like the sluggish pace of "improvements" we've seen with SIRI. My fear is that if these companies take their sweet time, they may run dry of cash and go out of business, taking their AI tech down with them.