Elon Musk announced Monday that he will ban Apple devices from his companies’ facilities if the iPhone creator moves forward with his planned OpenAI integration.
Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday and the biggest takeaway was that OpenAI’s ChatGPT will be combined with Siri.
In one example shown, Siri recommended that the iPhone user check ChatGPT for more dinner recipe ideas, noting that these new responses came from the OpenAI chatbot and advising users to “check important information for errors.”
Musk responded to the plan in X, saying that employees and visitors to his companies “would have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage.”
He said: ‘If Apple integrates OpenAI at the operating system level, then Apple devices will be banned from my companies. “This is an unacceptable security breach,” Musk wrote.
Elon Musk criticized Apple on Monday for partnering with OpenAI, which he co-founded with Sam Altman in 2015 (Musk pictured at the Viva Technology conference on June 16, 2023).
Altman and Musk’s relationship soured when OpenAI executives rejected a takeover offer from Tesla in 2018, causing Musk to leave the company (Altman pictured at the APEC CEO Summit on November 16, 2023).
Siri will be equipped with GPT-4o, the latest version of the famous chatbot that, according to some users, sounds like Scarlett Johansson’s character in the movie ‘Her’.
Before Musk’s post criticizing the move, Apple promised its users that, unlike normal use of ChatGPT directly from the OpenAI platform, users’ private information and queries will not be recorded or stored.
The broader service on offer is called Apple Intelligence, which will have its own image-generating AI called ‘Image Playground’. It also transforms Apple’s calculator app into a sheet of scratch paper for solving complex math problems.
Apple CEO Tim Cook said one of the five criteria Apple Intelligence must meet is to be “private.”
According to the filing, Apple Intelligence will “keep users’ personal information on their devices instead of uploading it to an Apple-owned cloud” thanks to the company’s powerful new M chips.
Musk made it clear in a later post that he doesn’t believe in that.
“It is patently absurd that Apple is not smart enough to create its own AI and yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI protects your security and privacy,” he wrote.
‘Apple has no idea what really happens once they hand over their data to OpenAI. They are selling you down the river.
Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers a speech at the start of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, 2024 in Cupertino, California.
There is an option for Apple users to log into their existing ChatGPT account to use the service’s pro features if they pay for them. In that scenario, ChatGPT will log your queries as it normally would under the usual terms and conditions.
The responses to Musk’s post were full of people begging him to release his own phone using the X brand or the Tesla brand.
‘Honestly, at this point we need Tesla or X to come out with a Starlink-powered phone. “I would change in a heartbeat,” wrote right-wing film director Robby Starbuck.
“I don’t trust Sam Altman and I don’t want his technology on my phone, in my office or around my family.”
Elon Musk co-founded OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015, and the company was supposed to be a nonprofit organization that would serve as a watchdog on potential threats that artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.
Their relationship soured when OpenAI executives rejected a takeover offer from Tesla in 2018, causing Musk to leave the company.
Altman once admired Musk, but the two have since publicly feuded over disagreements over the direction OpenAI should be taken.
In March, Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, its current CEO, for an alleged betrayal of the company’s founding goals of benefiting humanity rather than seeking profit.
Sam Altman responded to Musk’s lawsuit on an episode of Lex Fridman’s podcast, saying he didn’t think it was a question of OpenAI being open source or not.
OpenAI’s founders released a series of emails from Musk in which he supported the company’s pivot toward a mix of nonprofit and for-profit organizations. Business Insider reported.
Musk too joked in X that he would drop the lawsuit if the company changed its name to ClosedAI.
“I think that speaks to the seriousness with which Elon treats the lawsuit, and it’s a surprising thing to say,” Altman said.
