Reed’s view
OpenAI may be drifting apart from Microsoft, but it has one thing in common with the maker of Windows and Office: it’s all about developers. And that puts it on a collision course with Apple.
On Monday, OpenAI unveiled a new way companies can integrate with ChatGPT, making it possible to, say, book tickets through Expedia without ever leaving the chatbot app. Hidden behind the announcement is a tacit admission: While AI models can do amazing things, they aren’t good enough to handle those actions unsupervised. I experienced this recently when I used Perplexity’s Comet browser to figure out how to sign up for the airport lounge program Priority Pass, which I knew was buried somewhere deep inside a credit card website. Comet figured it out in one try and signed me up in a couple of minutes. I later found out it had entered a random phone number instead of mine, made up my place of birth in the security questions, and forgot which email address it used.
The chatbot experience can still be magical for users — it is just going to take a lot of manual, human labor to get there. If OpenAI can convince developers and companies to zero in on fine-tuning very specific capabilities, it will attract more users to the service, which will in turn attract more developers, creating the kind of flywheel that makes platforms successful and difficult to compete with.
Once OpenAI has enough of these app integrations inside its service, ChatGPT could be like a super app. There’s a problem, though, on mobile. Apple strictly limits the capabilities apps are allowed to have on its phones. Any purchase of digital goods would run afoul of the iPhone maker’s payment system. And Apple could consider these app integrations “apps within an app,” which it doesn’t allow.
If OpenAI is successful with its developer strategy, it will need a successful hardware strategy, too. And that’s why it’s bringing on ex-Apple designer Jony Ive — to beat the iPhone maker at its own game. The device can’t just be beautiful. It has to be so powerful that it essentially replaces the need for a phone altogether.
Notable
- While the rivalry with OpenAI heats up, Apple is also considering partnering with the ChatGPT maker — it’s been weighing integrating with its voice assistant Siri.
- Some critics are raising questions about OpenAI’s eye-watering growth, warning that AI spending is “unsustainable and circular,” Semafor’s Liz Hoffman and Rohan Goswami write.