Apple’s ChatGPT deal is Apple’s way of cheating in the assistant race

If you’re a fan of Apple products, then you were probably watching the company’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in excitement for what was to come. iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia updates were a big part of the show, but one particular announcement was one that had been leaked months prior. Siri was getting some big upgrades, and one of those big upgrades came in the form of native ChatGPT support on your Mac and iPhone.

Naturally, companies strive to innovate and improve their products, and Siri was one that was in desperate need of improvements and changes. After all, the service has remained more or less unchanged since its iPhone 4s debut over a decade ago. However, I can’t help but feel Apple’s deal with OpenAI isn’t a typical improvement that one would expect, but rather something one could nearly see as cheating.

Apple has always been behind in the assistant race

Improvements were obviously coming

To most people, Apple’s Siri sits behind the Google Assistant and Alexa as the worst voice assistant of the trio. It’s simply not that good in a lot of different ways, though the company has tried to improve it as time went on. With AI taking a front and center stage of pretty much all major companies these days, it’s unsurprising that Apple wanted a piece of the action.

What I think is worth analyzing is how Apple managed to do it. It’s not so much that the company has really worked hard to innovate and build on Siri (in some ways, they absolutely have), but for anything that the Google Assistant can do that isn’t being done by Siri, it’s essentially being outsourced. Sure, on-device recognition of who you are and understanding the context of your messages is cool, but what if I want to ask a complicated question to get a complicated answer? Siri is still completely useless; OpenAI’s chops are what gets it done.

In that sense, I can’t help but feel like it’s “cheating.” Obviously it doesn’t actually matter, but it’s an interesting thing to ponder when it comes to Apple and the things that the company cares to work with. We know the company has its own Large Language Models (LLMs) that it’s been training and developing, and it was even thought to be coming to Siri in the future. At some stage, though, Apple clearly decided to just take ChatGPT and give it to iOS users instead.

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It makes sense why Apple would do it

The company is literally paying OpenAI in exposure

Source: Apple

The interesting thing is that, according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Apple is paying OpenAI in exposure via distribution. That’s right, one of the richest companies in the world has managed to convince one of the most promising new tech companies of the modern age to provide its services for free in exchange for exposure.

If I were to guess, what I suspect may have happened is that Apple had its own LLMs that it could easily pivot to, giving it a strong position to start negotiations. On top of that, ChatGPT is free anyway, and its iOS integration means that users who have a Plus subscription can use their additional paid features from their iPhone. I’m betting that OpenAI will launch some specific ChatGPT Plus features that work on iPhones but require you to pay up. If ChatGPT is integrated well, OpenAI might see value in marketing to consumers who have ChatGPT on their smartphones instead of taking money directly from Apple.

In that sense, it makes sense why both companies see a win-win from this situation. Apple bolsters Siri’s capabilities with little effort on its part, and OpenAI might have a long play on gaining more customers. In the short-term, though, ChatGPT is still a third-party service that consumers will need to engage with to have an upgraded Siri experience, and it’s not clear if you can go back to getting regular Bing results. Not that Bing results were any good, but it’s better than not getting answers at all if you don’t want to use ChatGPT. I’m pretty skeptical of Apple’s approach to Siri and ChatGPT, and I feel like for users who don’t want to use ChatGPT, it’s going to be the same old, same old.

In that sense, maybe Siri is still behind the rest after all.

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