The OpenAI-Apple Deal Is a Hint of Something Bigger... For Microsoft

OpenAI is juggling alliances with the most powerful tech companies in the world

OpenAI has been showing off partnerships all week. News Corp, Vox Media (yikes), The Atlantic (double yikes)… but the most important deal was low-key revealed in an article by The Information (whose founder isn’t at all happy that news outlets are giving AI companies so much power, selling their journalism for pennies).[

If we’re to take the wording at face value, the Apple-OpenAI deal, which was first announced by Bloomberg earlier this month, is a closed matter:

Altman is more powerful than ever, having eliminated his primary foes within the company and succeeding in striking a key deal with Apple to boost the impact of OpenAI’s technology. … Altman recently met with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to discuss Microsoft’s concerns about how the Apple deal might affect the cloud software giant’s own product ambitions … The two executives also discussed the servers Microsoft would need to handle Apple’s use of OpenAI services…

There’s an interesting emphasis on the conflict of interest this deal creates with OpenAI’s other partner, Microsoft, which provides them with the computing power required to run ChatGPT and GPT-4. Apple and Microsoft have never been friends and OpenAI surely doesn’t want to threaten its relationship with the latter, so how did Satya Nadella allow this to happen? Is it an issue for his AI ambitions?

My answer is no. Microsoft has nothing to fear from the Apple deal because what they’re getting is much better.