Elon Musk to ban Apple devices if OpenAI is integrated in OS

Billionaire Elon Musk has threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies should Apple integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its iPhone, iPad, and Mac operating systems.

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation,” Musk stressed in a June 10 X post.

Musk even suggested that visitors to Tesla, Space Exploration Technologies Corp, and other companies he runs would need to have their Apple devices “stored in a Faraday cage” upon entry.

Source: Elon Musk

During Apple’s 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference on June 10, the tech giant revealed “Apple Intelligence” — a suite of new generative AI features — which will be rolled out to iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia later this year.

The development had been leaked from Bloomberg over the weekend.

One feature will enable Apple’s voice assistant, Siri, to relay user questions to ChatGPT when necessary. “Users are asked before any questions are sent to ChatGPT, along with any documents or photos, and Siri then presents the answer directly.”

The feature would be powered by GPT-4o — OpenAI’s latest iteration of ChatGPT.

But Musk said it is “patently absurd” that Apple “isn’t smart enough” to make their own AI and suggested they would be doing their customers a disservice by outsourcing privacy and security. “They’re selling you down the river.”

“Apple using the words ‘protect your privacy’ while handing your data over to a third-party AI that they don’t understand and can’t themselves create is *not* protecting privacy at all,” Musk said in another X post.

But Musk didn’t provide details of the privacy protections embedded into the OpenAI integration, and as a result, his X post triggered the “readers added context” feature.

It provided a link to Apple’s press statement explaining that user IP addresses would remain obscured and OpenAI won’t store requests.

Source: Elon Musk

The Apple Intelligence news didn’t inspire a price rally for AI-linked cryptocurrencies.

Render (RNDR), Fetch.ai (FET) and SingularityNET (AGIX) are down 5.9%, 3.3% and 3.9% over the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko.