Apple Eyes Deals with Google and Anthropic After OpenAI; Apple Grades Its LLMs While Databricks Grades AI Usage

On a basic level, none of the artificial intelligence Apple announced on Monday came as a surprise. But there's a big difference between a news report describing what Apple is going to launch and seeing the finished product, and in that regard Apple delivered a cogent presentation that put Google's sprawling AI keynote from May to shame.

Also, as promised, Apple gave plenty of prominence to OpenAI's ChatGPT for powering some of its new features. But the iPhone maker's software chief Craig Federighi also noted in the presentation that Apple will integrate large language models from other providers, including—he revealed in a later interview—Google's Gemini, and that it was starting with OpenAI because it's “the best.” Those others could also include Anthropic’s Claude: My colleague Anissa Gardizy tells us that Apple has been talking to the OpenAI archrival about a deal. In other words, LLM developers will have to compete to fulfill requests from Apple customers. Apple doesn't have to pick one LLM horse because all the horses want to live on its billion-customer ranch! This dynamic is the latest example of how generative AI is making large incumbents even stronger, rather than being a disruptive force that completely changes the tech pecking order as some tech investors had initially expected.