Musk slams Apple’s deal with OpenAI

ANDlon Musk took aim at Apple after it announced a partnership to use OpenAI technology in its devices. Musk took to his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) to express concerns about Apple’s possible integration with OpenAI at the operating system level after the union was announced on Monday, calling the deal a security risk.

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the operating system level, Apple devices will be banned in my companies,” Musk wrote. “Visitors will have to check in their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the company’s new AI offering, which the company calls “Apple Intelligence,” during the tech giant’s developer conference on June 10. Apple Intelligence will significantly expand Siri’s capabilities, but it will also add writing and imaging tools to Apple’s stock apps like Mail and Notes. The company also revealed a new agreement with OpenAI, which allows Apple to integrate ChatGPT directly into its Siri digital assistant and generative AI tools. Cook said Apple plans to offer integration with other AI models in the future.

During his presentation at the event, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, emphasized privacy, saying that Apple Intelligence is aware of personal data without collecting it. However, Musk didn’t seem convinced.

“It is patently absurd that Apple is not smart enough to create its own AI, but is somehow able to guarantee that OpenAI will protect its security and privacy!” he posted on X after Apple’s announcement. “Apple has no idea what’s really going on when it hands over its data to OpenAI,” he added. “They’re selling you down the river.”

Apple has already created its own AI models, which underpin many of the new features announced this week, and run locally on the device. For more complex tasks, Apple uses its own larger models running on what it calls “Private Cloud Compute”. According to Apple, these servers do not store customer data, they only use it to verify requests. Approved volunteers attached this information to Musk’s X post via a “Community Note” – a feature Musk has praised in the past as a way to combat misinformation.

“Private Cloud Compute uses your data only to fulfill your request and never stores it, ensuring it is never accessible to anyone, including Apple. And we designed the system so that independent experts can verify these protections,” Federighi said.

Along with its own models, Apple will integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Siri and its new generative tools to avoid the need for “jumping between tools.” Apple said users will be asked questions before sharing any information with ChatGPT. A demo of the tool indicates that users will have the option to accept input from ChatGPT for each task.

Musk’s comments come amid growing concerns about AI’s potential to infringe on user privacy. In May, Microsoft received criticism from a privacy watchdog over a new AI feature that regularly captured users’ screens. goal, provoked a reaction recently when it introduced new terms allowing it to train its AI models on data collected since 2007.

Musk’s criticism of the deal is the latest development in an ongoing dispute with OpenAI, which he helped co-found alongside current CEO Sam Altman and three others in 2015. Musk left OpenAI in 2018 after a falling out with company’s leadership team about its future.

See more information: Inside Elon Musk’s fight for the future of AI

In February 2023, three months after the launch of ChatGPT, Musk criticized OpenAI, writing that it has become a “maximum profit company effectively controlled by Microsoft.” The following month, Altman called journalist Kara Swisher an “idiot” of Musk. podcast, but also said he believes the Tesla CEO cares about AI and the future of humanity. Later that month, Musk was among more than 30,000 signatories to an open letter that called for a pause in training AI systems larger than OpenAI’s GPT-4. While the letter failed to convince leading AI labs such as OpenAI to halt these activities, it highlighted growing concern about the potential risks posed by artificial intelligence.

In July 2023, Musk unveiled his own artificial intelligence company, xAI. In November, it began previewing its own chatbot, Grok, for select X Premium users. In March 2024, xAI released Grok-1, an open source AI model, and xAI later raised US$6 billion. That same month, Musk filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Altman, alleging that they had violated the company’s founding principles by placing profit over benefiting humanity. OpenAI responded by releasing a series of emails that show Musk supported the creation of a for-profit entity. OpenAI has reported the court case, calling it “incoherent” and aimed at promoting Musk’s “commercial interests.”

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