Apple has reportedly renewed talks with OpenAI to build a chatbot for the iPhone

Apple has resumed talks with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, to power some AI features coming to iOS 18, according to new report in Bloomberg. Apple is also building its own large language models to power some iOS 18 features, but its talks with OpenAI are centered around a “chatbot/search component” According to to Bloomberg reporter Mark German.

Apple is also reportedly in talks with Google to license Gemini, Google’s own AI-based chatbot, for iOS 18. Bloomberg reports that those talks are still ongoing and things could still go either way. since Apple hasn’t made a final decision on which company’s technology to use. It’s possible, German says, that Apple could end up licensing AI technology from both companies or neither.

So far, Apple has been tight-lipped about its AI efforts, even as the rest of Silicon Valley has descended into an AI arms race. But he dropped enough hints to show he was up to something. When the company announced its earnings in February, CEO Tim Cook said that Apple continues to work and invest in artificial intelligence and is “excited to share details about our ongoing work in this space later this year.” It claims the brand new M3 MacBook Air it released last month is “the world’s best consumer laptop for AI” and will reportedly start releasing AI-centric laptops and desktops later this year. And earlier this week, Apple also released a handful of large open source language models that are designed to run locally on devices rather than in the cloud.

It’s not yet clear what Apple’s AI features will look like on the iPhone and other devices. Generative AI is still notoriously unreliable and prone to inventing answers. Recent AI-powered gadgets like the Humane Ai Pin have received disastrous reviews, while others like the Rabbit R1 have yet to prove their worth.

We’ll find out more at WWDC on June 10.