Apple has been in talks with other major AI companies, including Meta

Did hell just freeze over? According to a report in the Wall Street Journal, bitter rivals Apple and Meta have put their beef behind them and entered into talks about the possibility of Apple adding Meta’s AI to the iPhone.

At WWDC 24, Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI that will bake ChatGPT into Siri so that the AI chatbot can be used to answer queries that are beyond the capabilities of Apple’s virtual assistant. Craig Federighi announced that ChatGPT will be integrated into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia later this year, but that “we also intend to add support for other AI models in the future.” As per the report, this could include support for Meta AI.

Which AI platforms might we see come to the iPhone?

All the big players have been approached

It had already been reported that Apple was in talks with both Google and OpenAI about adding their AI capabilities to the iPhone. The report from the Wall Street Journal indicates that as well as Meta, Apple has also been in talks with two other AI companies: Anthropic and Perplexity. Anthropic has just released the latest version of its popular Claude AI chatbot. Claude 3.5 Sonnet has reportedly outperformed the latest ChatGPT and Gemini models across a number of metrics.

Perplexity has taken a slightly different approach to AI. Rather than build a general AI chatbot, Perplexity AI is primarily an AI search engine. It uses AI to retrieve information from multiple sources and shapes the information into up-to-date answers with relevant citations. The company describes it as an “answer engine.”

It’s not clear how talks have progressed with these companies, but if deals were made, Apple users would be able to choose which AI models they wanted to use in iOS 18. This could potentially mean that Apple users would have access to many of the most popular and capable AI products on the market right now. However, there’s no guarantee that any of the companies approached will strike a deal with Apple.

What’s in it for the AI companies?

It’s all about exposure

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The deal between Apple and OpenAI is an interesting one because neither party is paying the other. Apple gets the powerful features of ChatGPT that it’s not yet able to match with its own AI. It could also potentially get a share of any ChatGPT subscriptions that are made through Apple’s devices; although Apple owners can use ChatGPT for free, they can sign up for subscriptions to gain access to more features, and Apple may well take a cut of these subscriptions.

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From OpenAI’s side, the big upside is that it puts ChatGPT in front of a massive audience, including a significant number of people who may never have tried ChatGPT at all. Currently, AI chatbots are still fairly niche; they’re good at doing lots of things without having an obvious killer feature that would kick them into the mainstream. There’s still a limited number of people who use them on a daily basis, but baking ChatGPT into Apple products would almost certainly see a significant increase in usage. With over a billion active iPhone users worldwide, if only a fraction of those users sign up for a subscription, that could still be worth a huge amount of money.

For start-ups such as Anthropic and Perplexity, the exposure would seem like a no-brainer. However, Apple and Meta have a long-term rivalry and are direct competitors in some areas, such as AR/VR headsets. Whether the benefits of being on the iPhone are enough for Meta to put its beef aside remains to be seen.