OpenAI Showcases ChatGPT Integration with Apple Intelligence, Teases 'Super Secret AGI'

OpenAI shows us how Apple Intelligence works with ChatGPT, which then promptly crashes

OpenAI's 12 Days of OpenAI day five involved a demo of ChatGPT working with Apple Intelligence. The demo invoked the holiday season by sharing gifts with Apple and wearing holiday sweaters on the live stream. The announcement twined with Apple's release of iOS 18.2 and served to remind everyone that ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence have several deep links. OpenAI's models are making Siri smarter while powering several of the new features introduced by Apple on the same day. Unfortunately, while OpenAI was celebrating its Apple integration, the fifth day was a bit marred as the ChatGPT service had a sizable outage. This meant that if you've been trying to use ChatGPT, Sora, APIs, or even Dall-E, right after the OpenAI announcement then you were hit with a currently unavailable screen or encountered errors when trying to do anything. The service is back up and running now. Apple pitches Apple Intelligence as a way of making its devices more creative and intuitive to use. That includes many apps and tools on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Most notably, ChatGPT integration with Siri changes the voice assistant in remarkable ways. The AI helps answer complex questions for Siri to match its more natural, fluid conversations. Instead of getting short, robotic answers, you can ask detailed questions and get thoughtful, context-aware responses. The demonstration by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, product team member Miqdad Jaffer, and engineering manager Dave Cummings showcased how Siri could use ChatGPT to review documents and answer questions about it, with the answers coming from Apple's assistant. They also showed how you can send information right to ChatGPT to dive deeper and how Siri can now open different ChatGPT tools like Canvas and DALL-E. The presenters then had Siri review the most recent ChatGPT model card, asking the voice assistant about the model's coding abilities, and then had Siri send the response to the ChatGPT app to code a program visualizing those abilities. For OpenAI, this collaboration is a reminder that ChatGPT is ready to play a central role in mainstream tech. Apple Intelligence is making ChatGPT part of the daily experience for Apple users. And in return, Apple also gets a better shot at keeping pace with competitors like Google Gemini and other rivals. The festive sweaters worn by the presenters served an additional demonstration purpose, too. Using Apple Visual Intelligence, they had Siri process a photo of them in their sweaters, then had ChatGPT, via Apple Visual Intelligence, award one of them with the best sweater. Altman won.

OpenAI Teases 'Super Secret AGI'

On the fifth day of 12 Days of OpenAI, Sam Altman and co. took the opportunity to demonstrate how ChatGPT seamlessly integrates into the native AI experience inside an iPhone and a Mac. While the main announcement took centerstage, OpenAI intrigued its fans and users with an easter egg. On the iPhone used for the demo, a calendar event titled 'Super Secret AGI' seems to be scheduled. On the surface, it might look like an inside joke or vision to achieve AGI in the near future. Who knows? It is indeed possible that all of OpenAI's announcements, cumulatively at the end of the 12 days, might give a sense of clarity as to what artificial general intelligence will look like and feel. Simply put, if people aren't feeling the AGI yet, we don't know what AGI really is. For instance, OpenAI's recent release of its video generation model, Sora, gives an early glimpse of AGI -- one frame at a time. This new model from the company -- now accessible to Pro and Plus users -- is leveraging video as a medium for training models in real-world logic and dynamics. "We're just scratching the surface of what's possible," said Sam Altman. Apple has released the latest iOS/iPadOS 18.2 and the macOS Sequoia update, which includes an updated feature set for Apple Intelligence. These include the Image Playground, Genmoji, an upgrade for the Writing Tools, and Siri - which are now powered by ChatGPT. Siri can now fetch information and respond to a user's query using ChatGPT - but only when the user specifically asks it to use ChatGPT. The new Compose features let one access ChatGPT to generate text content on any writing tool across the system. Moreover, ChatGPT also aids the Visual Intelligence feature, which provides context to images from the user's real-world environment. The new Camera Control button on the iPhone 16 Pro allows the user to quickly open up Visual Intelligence. On the Mac, OpenAI also demonstrated using Siri with ChatGPT to ask questions based on a 49-page PDF document. ChatGPT is available as an opt-in-only extension inside Apple Intelligence settings. One doesn't necessarily need an account to use ChatGPT in Apple Intelligence. Most importantly, Apple Intelligence is now available with localised English support for Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, South Africa, and the U.K. - while the official release for English (India) is set to be launched soon. Apple's partnership with OpenAI is interesting, as it has been reported that the Cupertino giant isn't paying OpenAI anything for the integration of ChatGPT on its devices. Rather, Apple sees value in adding ChatGPT to millions of iPhone, iPad and Mac users across the globe. It was also said that Apple was granted a board observer role at OpenAI, which was soon dropped after a few weeks. Furthermore, in October, Apple also reportedly backed out of OpenAI's $6 billion funding round. Other features focus on adding text to visual tools to Apple devices. The Image Playground lets users generate images with styles and illustrations of their own and also supports creating visuals 'likeness of a family member or friend using photos'. Similarly, Genmoji lets the user create an emoji using a prompt, and like Image Playground, it allows using photos to create an emoji resembling real people. That said, Apple is still lagging behind Google in their AI offerings. More so, given the fact that Google dropped huge updates to Gemini 2.0. While it is only available via the API for developers, it will surely arrive for Pixel devices and other Android phones in due time. Although still in the testing stages, Project Astra received several upgrades, which now execute prompts inside tools like Google Search, Maps and Lens. The feature has been thoroughly tested on Android phones since it was launched at Google I/O this year. When it arrives on Android devices, Apple will have to seriously pull its socks up!