On the early morning of June 11th (Tuesday) Beijing time, Apple launched Apple Intelligence at the World Developers Conference (WWDC 24) and announced that it will cooperate with OpenAI. ChatGPT will be integrated into the next generation of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. The high concern for privacy has resulted in the Apple ecosystem being mostly closed, but this access to the third-party model ChatGPT has been questioned by some users, including Tesla founder Musk.
Musk has posted multiple tweets on the X platform, accusing Apple of "selling user data" and threatening to ban its companies from using iPhones. Musk posted, "If Apple integrates OpenAI at the operating system level, Apple devices will be banned by my company. This is an unacceptable security violation. Visitors' Apple devices must be inspected at the door and then stored in Faraday shields," he added.
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Network security expert Li Tiejun said in an interview with the Daily Economic News, "You cannot control whether third-party platforms will use user data to train their big models, and OpenAI's ChatGPT is like a third-party platform for Apple."
Apple explicitly stated that "every time ChatGPT is enabled, user consent will be obtained"
After the reporter noticed that Musk's questioning tweet was released, some media pointed out that Musk completely distorted Apple's intentions.
According to Apple, when the ChatGPT feature is enabled in iOS 18, it will be optional and user consent will be obtained each time it is enabled. When ChatGPT is disabled, it will send queries to Apple servers supported by Apple Silicon on Apple LLM, and all content will be encrypted end-to-end. If ChatGPT is enabled, the user will be asked whether to forward the text to ChatGPT.
Apple displays "Can Siri requests send queries to ChatGPT"
The data sent to ChatGPT depends entirely on the specific situation. However, it will never be sent without the user's consent, and only the data required for the query will be sent. Images, text, or search queries sent to ChatGPT will not include identifiers and will be discarded after generating results and sending them to the user. Even if Apple and ChatGPT "lie and conspire" to collect user data, the data they obtain is only the data that users voluntarily choose to send. This is not significantly different from installing the ChatGPT application on an iPhone.
When Musk posted continuously on the X platform, accusing Apple of "selling user data," many people pointed out that "enabling ChatGPT requires user consent," but Musk seemed not to buy it.
Sutter Hill Ventures venture capitalist and Chief Technology Officer Sam Pullara wrote, "Users decide whether to approve ChatGPT based on requests from Apple devices, and OpenAI does not have access to the device."
Musk insisted, "Apple is not smart enough to develop its own artificial intelligence (AI), but it is absurd to believe that OpenAI can protect your security and privacy! Once you hand over your data to OpenAI, Apple has no idea what exactly happened. They are selling you out."
Regarding this, cybersecurity expert Li Tiejun told the Daily Economic News reporter that in fact, some domestic technology companies have explicit regulations prohibiting uploading commercial documents to large models abroad. "Because you cannot control whether these third-party platforms will use user data for training purposes in their large models. I estimate this is also why Musk is angry. OpenAI's ChatGPT is a third-party platform for Apple." He explained.
Why is Musk unhappy with Apple's collaboration with OpenAI?
The Daily Economic News reporter noticed that in fact, both Apple and OpenAI have had conflicts with Musk.
After acquiring Twitter (now the X platform) in 2022, Musk criticized Apple in a tweet, stating that the company has basically stopped advertising on Twitter and threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store. In the end, he met with Cook and resolved the issue, stating that they had a "good conversation" and resolved the misunderstanding.
As one of the former initiators of OpenAI, the conflict between Musk and OpenAI erupted in March this year. At that time, Musk filed a lawsuit with the San Francisco High Court, suing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman for breach of contract.
Musk sued OpenAI and Altman because he believed that Altman and OpenAI violated an agreement reached when the AI research company was founded - to develop technology for the benefit of humanity, rather than for profit. The ChatGPT released in March 2023 marks a significant departure from OpenAI principles. GPT-4 is a closed source model, which violates the spirit of open source and is for commercial purposes rather than human interests.
Musk filed charges against OpenAI, including breach of contract, breach of trust obligations, and unfair business practices, and demanded that the company restore open source. Afterwards, Musk also posted on X, asking OpenAI to change its name to ClosedAI, so he withdrew the lawsuit. In July 2023, Musk's xAI was officially established and stated that it will definitely compete with OpenAI. Recently, xAI just announced that it has received $6 billion in financing.
Li Tiejun added to the reporter that the previous conflict with OpenAI made Musk distrust OpenAI, so Apple's integration of ChatGPT in iOS 18 made him even more angry.
The reason why Apple is relatively slow in AI competitions among major technology companies is mainly based on privacy considerations, which has been repeatedly mentioned at WWDC press conferences. Previously, Canalys released a report stating that consumer interest is constrained by privacy and data security issues, therefore transparency and corporate responsibility are crucial in designing and implementing AI functionality.
In response, Apple stated that its artificial intelligence functions will be processed on the device to ensure the privacy of information. For AI functions that require access to the cloud, a "private cloud" will be used, and data will never be stored on servers. Apple also claims that it will never be able to access this data and will invite independent experts to verify whether Apple's claims are true.
