As part of its Apple Intelligence feature set, Apple on Monday announced a partnership with OpenAI that will allow Siri to access ChatGPT directly in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and macOS Sequoia to provide better responses in relevant situations.
In conversation with reporters after the WWDC keynote, Apple's senior VP of software engineering Craig Federighi revealed that as Apple Intelligence evolves, the company eventually wants to give its users a choice between different AI models, and suggested that Google Gemini could be an option in the future.
"We think ultimately people are going to have a preference for certain models they want to use, maybe one that's great for creative writing or one that they prefer for coding," said Federighi. "Maybe Google Gemini in the future. I mean, nothing to announce right now, but that's our direction."
Federighi said that Apple's decision to start with ChatGPT was because the company wanted to "start with the best." Siri will leverage GPT-4o for free, with no need to create an account. Requests are not logged and IP addresses are obscured, while ChatGPT subscribers will also be able to access paid features within the experiences.
Apple Intelligence features are not included in the first beta of iOS 18, and instead will become available for testing over the U.S. summer. iOS 18 is expected to be publicly released in September.
