A bit surprised to see them go with OpenAI over Anthropic. OpenAI obviously has much broader consumer recognition and appeal, but I've been expecting a strategic partnership between Apple and a model co (Anthropic made most sense to me) with eventual acquisition - given they seem to be lagging so far behind the rest Magnificent Seven on the AI front
layer8 · 4h ago
Apple has an existing deal with OpenAI for the Siri-to-ChatGPT fallback that allegedly costs them nothing. I wouldn’t be surprised if OpenAI wants them to switch to GPT-5 because of (for example) lower operational costs. The whole news here may be about nothing more than switching the existing functionality to the newer and more cost-efficient model.
wenc · 2h ago
I subscribe to all 3: ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.
In terms of humanity, Claude is the best and probably the best fit for Apple audiences. It’s the emotionally friend who is level headed. The NYTimes did an article on Claude which captures this sentiment.
ChatGPT is like the exuberant nerd who wants to talk shop.
Gemini is a the brainy but less emotionally intelligent friend.
biophysboy · 4h ago
Why is there so much pressure for Apple to compete in LLM AI? There's a lot of competitors. It would cost them a lot. Their business in design/manufacturing/branding is not as compatible w/ AI as social media or search. All of the AI-related consumer products so far have been mediocre and redundant given the smartphone.
I don't understand why their best strategy isn't to just stand and watch, and then ruthlessly integrate the winner with their product line.
bitpush · 3h ago
If companies like Apple and Google don't lead in AI, they risk becoming obsolete. Once customers see their phone as just a device for accessing a universal AI like ChatGPT, they'll no longer be locked into an iPhone or Android. They'll just buy whatever device offers the best access to that AI.
This is the same reason Apple ensures that apps from its App Store work better than websites. They need to keep their own platform essential.
biophysboy · 3h ago
Is your refutation that leading AI model design & operations will make you better at AI integration w/ physical devices? From my lay perspective, they seem distinct.
bitpush · 3h ago
You have to own the platform. If an iPhone is just a window to ChatGPT, people will eventually ask why they're paying a $1,000 premium and start looking for a cheaper $phone.
This is exactly why the "Apple Intelligence" branding was so crucial. The plan was to make the AI feel like a unique Apple feature, justifying the hardware purchase. While the launch may have tarnished that brand, expect Apple to lean heavily on it going forward.
The challenge is that any partnership with ChatGPT or Anthropic comes with a branding conflict. OpenAI will want credit, but a "Powered by ChatGPT" label is the last thing Apple wants. How Apple navigates this dilemma will be fascinating, as they are truly in a bind.
biophysboy · 2h ago
I guess I'm confused why its an existential threat to have Chatgpt/Anthropic/etc branding on an Apple device. Alphabet/Meta products both appear on iPhones and use their own branding. I guess it would be unprecedented for Apple to allow an external partner that deep into their walled garden and replace Siri, but I don't see total vertical integration as a plausible outcome for Apple. I think they would waste a bunch of money and then lose!
paulddraper · 1h ago
The pressure for Apple to create a model is not nearly as much as the pressure to have a model.
There's a lot of reason to have and use a model, OpenAI or otherwise.
Traubenfuchs · 3h ago
Them not doing this from the start to appease the public and shareholders with constant novelty was a massive failure.
TiredOfLife · 1h ago
Anthropic can and will remove Apple acces to their models on a whim.
ArtTimeInvestor · 4h ago
iOS, the iPhone operating system, which allows
users to make certain queries via GPT-4o
Any iOS users here who use any AI provided by Apple on their devices?
I have not seen a glimpse of it yet (I think it asked me once to enable it and I denied?). And when I ask friends about it, they also do not use any AI provided by Apple.
If anyone here is using it - how and what for? Do you like it?
Melatonic · 53m ago
I think I enabled it, downloaded whatever it needed, realized it took an extra X gigabytes of storage on my phone, and disabled it.
And then realized I was not getting that space back :-D
I have used the built in editor in their photos app a few times to remove an object from a photo (which works very well) which they label as "AI" but I swear existed before any of this.
drewg123 · 4h ago
I often say "hey Siri, ask ChatGpt <x>" when I'm hands free and want a better answer than siri throwing up some web pages and saying "i found this on the web for <x>".
This tends to give far better answers than Siri
madeofpalk · 3h ago
> they also do not use any AI provided by Apple.
They might, but not actually know. Does iOS (poorly) summarising notifications on the screen count as using AI? I can't remember what the default setting is in iOS 16, but in the new iOS this year you get prompted for this during OOB setup.
GeekyBear · 3h ago
On device text recognition from still images or video.
On device speech to text.
On device language translation.
andsoitis · 6h ago
> One of the largest deployments is iOS, the iPhone operating system, which allows users to make certain queries via GPT-4o.
How / where do you make these queries?
GeekyBear · 5h ago
It's covered a little farther down in the article.
It's optional, and the user's permission to send a request to ChatGPT is required every time.
> In most cases, LLM-related features built into iOS and macOS use Apple's own models, which live under the Apple Intelligence branding umbrella. But it gives users the choice of referring a prompt to ChatGPT on a case-by-case basis when the prompt is outside the scope of what Apple's models are designed for.
empath75 · 4h ago
I just setup a short cut "Hey siri, let's chat" that opens chatgpt voice.
650REDHAIR · 3h ago
Has gpt5 gotten better with voice?
I find when opening a new voice chat it talks entirely too much.
Any tips or are you just far more patient than me?
stetrain · 5h ago
It's one of the few Apple Intelligence features announced last year that actually shipped in iOS 18.
Also Apple Intelligence requires a modern (2023+) device, e.g., iPhone 15 Pro+ or iPhone 16.
Ancapistani · 2h ago
… which is honestly pretty crazy to me. My iPhone 13 Pro Max still feels “new” to me. The iPad Pro I’m typing this on is six years old, and is only just now starting to feel like the battery is aging.
anon7000 · 6h ago
Siri will fall back to ChatGPT if the question is outside of Siri’s domain.
guestbest · 5h ago
The phone can already copy your voice based on only a few hundred words, right? The next step is to have it remotely apply, work, and attend meetings for me. The invisible touch of the market if you will
tptacek · 5h ago
You mean invisible hand, unless you were making a joke about late-period Genesis songs.
freedomben · 5h ago
They seem to have an invisible touch, eh? They reach in, and grab right hold of your heart.
JSR_FDED · 3h ago
It seems a built-in ability.
abtinf · 4h ago
I think the play on words is: invisible hand + (iPhone) touch screen = invisible touch.
varispeed · 5h ago
The future where AI agent lives your life and you can just pitch a tent somewhere in wilderness and escape it all.
dyauspitr · 4h ago
Why would they give you an agent there’s no need for a middleman here. You’ll pitch your tent and live out in the wilderness for sheer survival.
SpaceManNabs · 6h ago
I thought one of the draws for apple devices was privacy. Wonder how they account for that.
In addition, i know a lot of apple device owners dislike AI integration. For example, my non tech friends turned off a lot of the apple intelligence stuff in the recent big iOS update.
karmakaze · 1h ago
With few new products in the pipeline, minor bumps to existing ones (liquid glass is a distraction not a feature), and lowering prices to expand market, at some point a for-profit company is going to reconsider the value of privacy and reframe that value in dollars.
GeekyBear · 5h ago
Sending anything to ChatGPT requires explicit permission from the user, every time.
I believe they let you interface with OpenAI anonymously if you don't have an account. Of course, your usage is much more limited if you don't have an account. So you can either use it a lot with no anonymity, or use it a little with anonymity, at least IME.
andrewstuart · 4h ago
It’s a real concern that the best Apple can do is use OpenAI instead of its own technology.
woah · 4h ago
Maybe, but being a foundation model provider means running neck to neck with small incremental improvements twice a year at astronomical expense. Maybe Apple has intentionally decided to sit it out and swoop in later once things have settled down.
This strategy makes a lot of sense if you believe that progress will plateau at the current level with small incremental improvements in reliability and UX. Apple really only pays a price if failing to develop their own foundation model results in their phones not selling, which doesn't seem to be the case, regardless of how much of an embarrassment Siri is. Right now, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Grok are all bludgeoning each other with trillions of dollars and creating a perfect situation for Apple to swoop in in a couple years when reliability is sorted out and GPU compute has crashed to rock-bottom prices.
lelanthran · 3h ago
Well, exactly.
"Providing tokens" is the bottom layer of the value chain. If you can't build a moat around it, it's a race to the bottom because you can only compete on price.
Apple doesn't compete on the bottom of the value chain.
bmau5 · 4h ago
This makes a lot of sense
nicce · 4h ago
Apple doesn't need to build reputation and burn billions of dollars to get a name. They can wait and see what the real potential is. Then, in the end, they publish their own close-enough model and it will become de-facto model in Apple ecosystem.
Google must keep up with others because it is ad company. And oh boy the potential of influence with AI models.
Terretta · 4h ago
“Shame the best they can do is use Corning instead of their own glass.”
Neither of these seem like a shame so much as leveraging SOTA.
WorldPeas · 4h ago
The difference is that nobody chooses Apple explicitly for their glass. They choose them because they provide a bleeding edge experience without the effort one would need to maintain something like a Linux install, Google now beats them to the punch on several parts of this with their AI approach, especially on-device.
acdha · 3h ago
People choose Apple devices because they work well and let them do things they want to do (they don’t buy for the Corning name, they buy for durability). Google has a lot of marketing and we follow developments closely here on HN but I have never heard anyone other than nerds who already included Android in their personal identity say that Gemini does anything substantial for them, and they sound exactly like the way their grandfathers sounded having quasi-religious debates about Ford vs. Chevy while everyone else tried to change the subject.
That doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t be following the space closely but I think it’s a mistake to think that normal people are changing their buying decisions based on any of this yet. One trade off here is that Google is spending a ton of money but as of yet is massively in the red on that investment, which means they’ll stick with their own LLM while Apple is free to switch to whoever the market leader is without a large sunk cost factoring into the decision.
expensive_news · 1h ago
It is interesting seeing the difference in model perception between “normal” people and the Hacker News crowd.
My perception is that a huge percentage of the mass market just like OpenAI because they were the first to market and still have the most name recognition. Even my coworker who works in DevOps says “Gemini sucks, Claude sucks” even though he has never once tried either of them and has never looked at a single benchmark comparison.
andrewstuart · 2h ago
Ummm I use Gemini heavily for AI development I have found it to be superb.
I am very very far from a google fanboi.
russelldjimmy · 4h ago
One might argue that no one chooses Pixels for Gemini (yet).
mietek · 5h ago
Can we maybe have fewer bugs in the OS instead of more barely functional AI slop?
amelius · 5h ago
Yeah, why don't they use the AI to fix their OS? Oh wait ...
k310 · 5h ago
My guess is that it will "extend" existing apps unless you turn it off.
Until you can't!
Disclaimer: I am speculating here.
AlexandrB · 5h ago
I'm less pessimistic because I remember how system level Twitter/Facebook integration turned out (it was removed).
k310 · 2h ago
To all the downvoters,even though this reply is to you, yes, there was the twitter integration that went away, but also SIRI listening in at uninvited times, to learn.
Apple may not be the worst offender, but they do from time to time, introduce things that have to be pulled back later.
Will the "Use Apple AI" switch go away? We just don't know, and there are aspects of MacOS that I detest, like search always starting in "This Mac" instead of the working directory, that I have to change almost every time, and search beginning as soon as you type in a search term, (enter the beach ball) rather than waiting a few letters, while slowing down your typing. These may never go away.
And there are lots of other examples on mac forums.
What or who determines what goes away and what stays, begging a fix from some app vendor?
nialse · 4h ago
Apple using GPT-5 explains quite a lot of the PhD vibe of the model. They have always been notoriously picky with what Siri does and especially what it doesn’t. I bet that Apple had a say in what and how GPT-5 was trained. Might also explain why it took so long. Extra guardrails for everything. And little emotion.
podgietaru · 4h ago
…they already used other versions of ChatGPT.
I doubt very much apple had any say over the personality of GPT-5. And if it did, it’d be in the prompt it sends over to ChatGPT - not in the training and reinforcement part.
nialse · 2h ago
Time will tell, time will tell.
Yes, Apple is using another model right now, but, they desperately need an AI win. Thus, they likely want a “latest and greatest model” and they have the leverage to influence what goes into the model. Due to Apple’s previous AI hiccups, performance, safety and guardrails are prioritized, thus a Siri flavored GPT-5.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44837367
In terms of humanity, Claude is the best and probably the best fit for Apple audiences. It’s the emotionally friend who is level headed. The NYTimes did an article on Claude which captures this sentiment.
ChatGPT is like the exuberant nerd who wants to talk shop.
Gemini is a the brainy but less emotionally intelligent friend.
I don't understand why their best strategy isn't to just stand and watch, and then ruthlessly integrate the winner with their product line.
This is the same reason Apple ensures that apps from its App Store work better than websites. They need to keep their own platform essential.
This is exactly why the "Apple Intelligence" branding was so crucial. The plan was to make the AI feel like a unique Apple feature, justifying the hardware purchase. While the launch may have tarnished that brand, expect Apple to lean heavily on it going forward.
The challenge is that any partnership with ChatGPT or Anthropic comes with a branding conflict. OpenAI will want credit, but a "Powered by ChatGPT" label is the last thing Apple wants. How Apple navigates this dilemma will be fascinating, as they are truly in a bind.
There's a lot of reason to have and use a model, OpenAI or otherwise.
I have not seen a glimpse of it yet (I think it asked me once to enable it and I denied?). And when I ask friends about it, they also do not use any AI provided by Apple.
If anyone here is using it - how and what for? Do you like it?
And then realized I was not getting that space back :-D
I have used the built in editor in their photos app a few times to remove an object from a photo (which works very well) which they label as "AI" but I swear existed before any of this.
This tends to give far better answers than Siri
They might, but not actually know. Does iOS (poorly) summarising notifications on the screen count as using AI? I can't remember what the default setting is in iOS 16, but in the new iOS this year you get prompted for this during OOB setup.
On device speech to text.
On device language translation.
How / where do you make these queries?
It's optional, and the user's permission to send a request to ChatGPT is required every time.
> In most cases, LLM-related features built into iOS and macOS use Apple's own models, which live under the Apple Intelligence branding umbrella. But it gives users the choice of referring a prompt to ChatGPT on a case-by-case basis when the prompt is outside the scope of what Apple's models are designed for.
I find when opening a new voice chat it talks entirely too much.
Any tips or are you just far more patient than me?
https://support.apple.com/guide/iphone/use-chatgpt-with-appl...
In addition, i know a lot of apple device owners dislike AI integration. For example, my non tech friends turned off a lot of the apple intelligence stuff in the recent big iOS update.
https://security.apple.com/blog/private-cloud-compute/
This strategy makes a lot of sense if you believe that progress will plateau at the current level with small incremental improvements in reliability and UX. Apple really only pays a price if failing to develop their own foundation model results in their phones not selling, which doesn't seem to be the case, regardless of how much of an embarrassment Siri is. Right now, Microsoft, OpenAI, Meta, Google, and Grok are all bludgeoning each other with trillions of dollars and creating a perfect situation for Apple to swoop in in a couple years when reliability is sorted out and GPU compute has crashed to rock-bottom prices.
"Providing tokens" is the bottom layer of the value chain. If you can't build a moat around it, it's a race to the bottom because you can only compete on price.
Apple doesn't compete on the bottom of the value chain.
Google must keep up with others because it is ad company. And oh boy the potential of influence with AI models.
Neither of these seem like a shame so much as leveraging SOTA.
That doesn’t mean that Apple shouldn’t be following the space closely but I think it’s a mistake to think that normal people are changing their buying decisions based on any of this yet. One trade off here is that Google is spending a ton of money but as of yet is massively in the red on that investment, which means they’ll stick with their own LLM while Apple is free to switch to whoever the market leader is without a large sunk cost factoring into the decision.
My perception is that a huge percentage of the mass market just like OpenAI because they were the first to market and still have the most name recognition. Even my coworker who works in DevOps says “Gemini sucks, Claude sucks” even though he has never once tried either of them and has never looked at a single benchmark comparison.
I am very very far from a google fanboi.
Until you can't!
Disclaimer: I am speculating here.
Apple may not be the worst offender, but they do from time to time, introduce things that have to be pulled back later.
Will the "Use Apple AI" switch go away? We just don't know, and there are aspects of MacOS that I detest, like search always starting in "This Mac" instead of the working directory, that I have to change almost every time, and search beginning as soon as you type in a search term, (enter the beach ball) rather than waiting a few letters, while slowing down your typing. These may never go away.
And there are lots of other examples on mac forums.
What or who determines what goes away and what stays, begging a fix from some app vendor?
I doubt very much apple had any say over the personality of GPT-5. And if it did, it’d be in the prompt it sends over to ChatGPT - not in the training and reinforcement part.
Yes, Apple is using another model right now, but, they desperately need an AI win. Thus, they likely want a “latest and greatest model” and they have the leverage to influence what goes into the model. Due to Apple’s previous AI hiccups, performance, safety and guardrails are prioritized, thus a Siri flavored GPT-5.