With Apple set to announce iOS 18 (and a whole lot more) at its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 10, it's rumored that the company is in talks with ChatGPT developer OpenAI to help with a major AI upgrade for the iPhone.
This comes from the usually reliable Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who says discussions between Apple and OpenAI have been "renewed" and are now intensifying, according to unnamed people "familiar with the matter".
Last month Bloomberg reported that Apple was speaking to Google about using the Gemini chatbot inside iOS 18, so this hasn't come completely out of the blue: Apple is clearly looking for a partnership with someone for its next big software upgrade.
What this latest report suggests is that OpenAI might have emerged as the frontrunner in the race, which means tools like ChatGPT and Dall-E (also developed by OpenAI) might find their way into the iOS 18 update, expected to be rolled out around September time.
To be confirmed
Gurman says that Apple hasn't made a decision yet: it might decide to work with Google, or with OpenAI, or with both companies. What is certain is that iOS 18 is going to be focused very much on artificial intelligence – Apple has already confirmed it.
We can expect iOS 18 to come with some kind of local, device-based AI too. Apple has already been showing off some new large language models (LLMs) that are small enough to be stored and run from a smartphone.
Exactly what we'll get remains to be seen, but some kind of AI text and image generation seems likely, plus a substantial upgrade to Siri. There have also been rumors of features like AI-powered playlist generation in Apple Music.
All eyes are now on WWDC 2024 in June, when everything Apple has been working on should be revealed – for iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, visionOS, and more. Public betas of these updates will then follow, before the final versions get pushed out.
