Elon Musk has vowed to ban iPhones at his companies after the tech giant announced it would bring rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT to their smartphones.
At Apple’s annual developer conference in California on June 10, Tim Cook unveiled Apple Intelligence, a series of features for text and image generation, an updated Siri voice assistant — and the news that it will integrate ChatGPT into iPhones.
The news did not go down well with Tesla and SpaceX founder Musk, who has a fractured relationship with OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015. He subsequently launched his own rival firm xAI, which has its own AI chatbot called Grok.
“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation,” he wrote, reacting to the news on his platform X, formerly Twitter.
“And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” Musk added.
In another rant against Apple, Musk raised concerns about Apple relying on OpenAI for “security and privacy,” suggesting the firm would keep hold of data, “selling you down the river.”
“It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security and privacy! Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river,” he penned.
Musk previously raised concerns that “out of control” artificial intelligence advances could “pose profound risks to society and humanity.”
He has since predicted that superhuman AI will outsmart us all by next year.
Musk had previously suggested super-intelligent robots would emerge in 2029 but has since warned it could be as soon as 2025.
“My guess is that we’ll have AI that is smarter than any one human probably around the end of next year. Last year it was chip-constrained,” he foretold.
“People could not get enough Nvidia chips. This year it’s transitioning to a voltage transformer supply. In a year or two, it’s just electricity supply,” Musk said during a livestreamed interview on his X platform.
