June 25, 2024 – Apple has rejected a potential artificial intelligence partnership with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, due to privacy concerns, according to a report by Bloomberg. The two tech giants had briefly discussed the possibility of collaborating in March of this year, but the negotiations failed to progress and Apple has no plans to integrate Meta’s large language model (LLM) into its iOS system.
Last weekend, The Wall Street Journal suggested that Apple and Meta were actively discussing the integration of Facebook’s LLM, Llama, into the “Apple Intelligence” feature of iOS 18. However, the report indicated that the discussions were still ongoing and had not been finalized. Bloomberg’s latest report clarifies that Apple never seriously considered partnering with Meta.
The initial negotiations took place while Apple was simultaneously discussing potential collaborations with OpenAI and Alphabet, the parent company of Google. However, Apple ultimately decided not to pursue more formal discussions with Meta due to concerns over the company’s privacy measures, which Apple deemed insufficiently rigorous.
Instead, Apple has reached an agreement with OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT into iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia. This integration will allow users to opt-in to ChatGPT, enabling Siri to offload complex requests to the more powerful ChatGPT for processing. Additionally, Apple has partnered with Google to integrate the large language model Gemini into its operating systems and is in discussions with the artificial intelligence company Anthropic.
During the WWDC conference, Apple’s software engineering head, Craig Federighi, stated that the company aims to provide users with a choice of artificial intelligence models from different providers. To this end, Apple intends to establish partnerships with multiple suppliers in the AI field.
