Tesla CEO Elon Musk on Tuesday threatened to ban Apple devices at his companies after the US tech giant announced its partnership with OpenAI. It means X, Tesla, SpaceX and xAI employees may soon be prohibited from using iPhones, iPads, and Macs at their workplaces.
What Elon Musk said
In a post on X, xAI founder wrote, "If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation."
Mr Musk also mentioned that visitors would need to check in their Apple devices at the door, where they would be stored in a Faraday cage.
A Faraday cage is an enclosure that blocks all digital signals, including cellular signals, so that no data can be transmitted.
Speaking about Apple's deeper integration, Mr Musk wrote, "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 & privacy!"
What Apple said
In response, Apple clarified that it was using its own AI and that the OpenAI integration was optional, assuring users their data would not be logged.
While Mr Musk isn't happy about ChatGPT's deeper integration into Apple devices, the company says GPT4o-powered Siri and other apps on iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will ask permission each time to share data and allow access to ChatGPT without creating an account.
It further said that paid ChatGPT users can connect their accounts to access premium features that will be available on select iPhones, iPads and Macs later this year, with support for other AI models coming in the future.
The 'Grok' factor
Mr Musk's AI venture, Grok, has been developing advanced AI technologies, including language processing models akin to ChatGPT.
xAI is advancing its chatbot by integrating multimodal inputs, enabling users to upload images and receive text-based answers.
Launched in November 2023, Grok is accessible to subscribers of the X Premium Plus service.
The last update, Grok 1.5, was in March, which included improved reasoning capabilities. The model is trained on a variety of text data from publicly available internet sources up to Q3 2023 and curated datasets reviewed by human reviewers.
According to a blog post from X, Grok-1 was not trained on X data (including public X posts), but it has "real-time knowledge of the world," including posts on X.
Elon Musk on OpenAI being "woke"
However, Mr Musk has been critical of certain AI ethics and practices, often advocating for more transparent and conscientious AI development. Recently, he referred to ChatGPT as "woke," suggesting it embodied a certain social consciousness or political correctness that he disagreed with.
He said that they trained its language models to be overly careful about what they said after they put rules in place on ChatGPT from generating potentially offensive text.
So when his chatbot, Grok, entered the scene, comparisons were natural. An X user compared GrokAI with ChatGPT, claiming both were equally "woke."
Mr Musk acknowledged that GrokAI's training data was derived from the internet and influenced by "woke" content. However, he assured users that GrokAI would improve over time.
"Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense. Grok will get better. This is just the beta," Mr Musk wrote at the time.
