Enlarge (credit: OpenAI / Apple / Benj Edwards)

On Monday, Apple announced it would be integrating OpenAI's ChatGPT AI assistant into upcoming versions of its iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems. It paves the way for future third-party AI model integrations, but given Google's multi-billion-dollar deal with Apple for preferential web search, the OpenAI announcement inspired speculation about who is paying whom. According to a Bloomberg report published Wednesday, Apple considers ChatGPT's placement on its devices as compensation enough.

"Apple isn’t paying OpenAI as part of the partnership," writes Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, citing people familiar with the matter who wish to remain anonymous. "Instead, Apple believes pushing OpenAI’s brand and technology to hundreds of millions of its devices is of equal or greater value than monetary payments."

The Bloomberg report states that neither company expects the agreement to generate meaningful revenue in the short term, and in fact, the partnership could burn extra money for OpenAI, because it pays Microsoft to host ChatGPT's capabilities on its Azure cloud. However, OpenAI could benefit by converting free users to paid subscriptions, and Apple potentially benefits by providing easy, built-in access to ChatGPT during a time when its own in-house LLMs are still catching up.

Enlarge / He isn't using an iPhone, but some people talk to Siri like this.

On Monday, Apple premiered "Apple Intelligence" during a wide-ranging presentation at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. However, the heart of its new tech, an array of Apple-developed AI models, was overshadowed by the announcement of ChatGPT integration into its device operating systems.

Since rumors of the partnership first emerged, we've seen confusion on social media about why Apple didn't develop a cutting-edge GPT-4-like chatbot internally. Despite Apple's year-long development of its own large language models (LLMs), many perceived the integration of ChatGPT (and opening the door for others, like Google Gemini) as a sign of Apple's lack of innovation.

"This is really strange. Surely Apple could train a very good competing LLM if they wanted? They've had a year," wrote AI developer Benjamin De Kraker on X. Elon Musk has also been grumbling about the OpenAI deal—and spreading misconceptions about it—saying things like, "It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy!"

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On Monday, Apple debuted "Apple Intelligence," a new suite of free AI-powered features for iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS Sequoia that includes creating email summaries, generating images and emoji, and allowing Siri to take actions on your behalf. These features are achieved through a combination of on-device and cloud processing, with a strong emphasis on privacy. Apple says that Apple Intelligence features will be widely available later this year and will be available as a beta test for developers this summer.

The announcements came during a livestream WWDC keynote and a simultaneous event attended by the press on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California. In an introduction, Apple CEO Tim Cook said the company has been using machine learning for years, but the introduction of large language models (LLMs) presents new opportunities to elevate the capabilities of Apple products. He emphasized the need for both personalization and privacy in Apple's approach.

At last year's WWDC, Apple avoided using the term "AI" completely, instead preferring terms like "machine learning" as Apple's way of avoiding buzzy hype while integrating applications of AI into apps in useful ways. This year, Apple figured out a new way to largely avoid the abbreviation "AI" by coining "Apple Intelligence," a catchall branding term that refers to a broad group of machine learning, LLM, and image generation technologies. By our count, the term "AI" was used sparingly in the keynote—most notably near the end of the presentation when Apple executive Craig Federighi said, "It's AI for the rest of us."

Enlarge (credit: DuckDuckGo)

On Thursday, DuckDuckGo unveiled a new "AI Chat" service that allows users to converse with four mid-range large language models (LLMs) from OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Mistral in an interface similar to ChatGPT while attempting to preserve privacy and anonymity. While the AI models involved can output inaccurate information readily, the site allows users to test different mid-range LLMs without having to install anything or sign up for an account.

DuckDuckGo's AI Chat currently features access to OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, Anthropic's Claude 3 Haiku, and two open source models, Meta's Llama 3 and Mistral's Mixtral 8x7B. The service is currently free to use within daily limits. Users can access AI Chat through the DuckDuckGo search engine, direct links to the site, or by using "!ai" or "!chat" shortcuts in the search field. AI Chat can also be disabled in the site's settings for users with accounts.

According to DuckDuckGo, chats on the service are anonymized, with metadata and IP address removed to prevent tracing back to individuals. The company states that chats are not used for AI model training, citing its privacy policy and terms of use.

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Zoom CEO Eric Yuan has a vision for the future of work: sending your AI-powered digital twin to attend meetings on your behalf. In an interview with The Verge's Nilay Patel published Monday, Yuan shared his plans for Zoom to become an "AI-first company," using AI to automate tasks and reduce the need for human involvement in day-to-day work.

"Let’s say the team is waiting for the CEO to make a decision or maybe some meaningful conversation, my digital twin really can represent me and also can be part of the decision making process," Yuan said in the interview. "We’re not there yet, but that’s a reason why there’s limitations in today’s LLMs."

LLMs are large language models—text-predicting AI models that power AI assistants like ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot. They can output very convincing human-like text based on probabilities, but they are far from being able to replicate human reasoning. Still, Yuan suggests that instead of relying on a generic LLM to impersonate you, in the future, people will train custom LLMs to simulate each person.

Enlarge / Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang delivers his keystone speech ahead of Computex 2024 in Taipei on June 2, 2024. (credit: SAM YEH/AFP via Getty Images)

On Sunday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reached beyond Blackwell and revealed the company's next-generation AI-accelerating GPU platform during his keynote at Computex 2024 in Taiwan. Huang also detailed plans for an annual tick-tock-style upgrade cycle of its AI acceleration platforms, mentioning an upcoming Blackwell Ultra chip slated for 2025 and a subsequent platform called "Rubin" set for 2026.

Nvidia's data center GPUs currently power a large majority of cloud-based AI models, such as ChatGPT, in both development (training) and deployment (inference) phases, and investors are keeping a close watch on the company, with expectations to keep that run going.

During the keynote, Huang seemed somewhat hesitant to make the Rubin announcement, perhaps wary of invoking the so-called Osborne effect, whereby a company's premature announcement of the next iteration of a tech product eats into the current iteration's sales. "This is the very first time that this next click as been made," Huang said, holding up his presentation remote just before the Rubin announcement. "And I'm not sure yet whether I'm going to regret this or not."

Enlarge / The Google "G" logo surrounded by whimsical characters, all of which look stunned and surprised. (credit: Google)

On Thursday, Google capped off a rough week of providing inaccurate and sometimes dangerous answers through its experimental AI Overview feature by authoring a follow-up blog post titled, "AI Overviews: About last week." In the post, attributed to Google VP Liz Reid, head of Google Search, the firm formally acknowledged issues with the feature and outlined steps taken to improve a system that appears flawed by design, even if it doesn't realize it is admitting it.

To recap, the AI Overview feature—which the company showed off at Google I/O a few weeks ago—aims to provide search users with summarized answers to questions by using an AI model integrated with Google's web ranking systems. Right now, it's an experimental feature that is not active for everyone, but when a participating user searches for a topic, they might see an AI-generated answer at the top of the results, pulled from highly ranked web content and summarized by an AI model.

While Google claims this approach is "highly effective" and on par with its Featured Snippets in terms of accuracy, the past week has seen numerous examples of the AI system generating bizarre, incorrect, or even potentially harmful responses, as we detailed in a recent feature where Ars reporter Kyle Orland replicated many of the unusual outputs.

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On Thursday, several major tech companies, including Google, Intel, Microsoft, Meta, AMD, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, Cisco, and Broadcom, announced the formation of the Ultra Accelerator Link (UALink) Promoter Group to develop a new interconnect standard for AI accelerator chips in data centers. The group aims to create an alternative to Nvidia's proprietary NVLink interconnect technology, which links together multiple servers that power today's AI applications like ChatGPT.

The beating heart of AI these days lies in GPUs, which can perform massive numbers of matrix multiplications—necessary for running neural network architecture—in parallel. But one GPU often isn't enough for complex AI systems. NVLink can connect multiple AI accelerator chips within a server or across multiple servers. These interconnects enable faster data transfer and communication between the accelerators, allowing them to work together more efficiently on complex tasks like training large AI models.

This linkage is a key part of any modern AI data center system, and whoever controls the link standard can effectively dictate which hardware the tech companies will use. Along those lines, the UALink group seeks to establish an open standard that allows multiple companies to contribute and develop AI hardware advancements instead of being locked into Nvidia's proprietary ecosystem. This approach is similar to other open standards, such as Compute Express Link (CXL)—created by Intel in 2019—which provides high-speed, high-capacity connections between CPUs and devices or memory in data centers.

Enlarge / Helen Toner, former OpenAI board member, speaks during Vox Media's 2023 Code Conference at The Ritz-Carlton, Laguna Niguel on September 27, 2023. (credit: Getty Images)

In a recent interview on "The Ted AI Show" podcast, former OpenAI board member Helen Toner said the OpenAI board was unaware of the existence of ChatGPT until they saw it on Twitter. She also revealed details about the company's internal dynamics and the events surrounding CEO Sam Altman's surprise firing and subsequent rehiring last November.

OpenAI released ChatGPT publicly on November 30, 2022, and its massive surprise popularity set OpenAI on a new trajectory, shifting focus from being an AI research lab to a more consumer-facing tech company.

"When ChatGPT came out in November 2022, the board was not informed in advance about that. We learned about ChatGPT on Twitter," Toner said on the podcast.

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On Monday, OpenAI announced the formation of a new "Safety and Security Committee" to oversee risk management for its projects and operations. The announcement comes as the company says it has "recently begun" training its next frontier model, which it expects to bring the company closer to its goal of achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), though some critics say AGI is farther off than we might think. It also comes as a reaction to two weeks of public setbacks for the company.

Whether the aforementioned new frontier model is intended to be GPT-5 or a step beyond that is currently unknown. In the AI industry, "frontier model" is a term for a new AI system designed to push the boundaries of current capabilities. And "AGI" refers to a hypothetical AI system with human-level abilities to perform novel, general tasks beyond its training data (unlike narrow AI, which is trained for specific tasks).

Meanwhile, the new Safety and Security Committee, led by OpenAI directors Bret Taylor (chair), Adam D'Angelo, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman (CEO), will be responsible for making recommendations about AI safety to the full company board of directors. In this case, "safety" partially means the usual "we won't let the AI go rogue and take over the world," but it also includes a broader set of "processes and safeguards" that the company spelled out in a May 21 safety update related to alignment research, protecting children, upholding election integrity, assessing societal impacts, and implementing security measures.