OpenAI shows us how Apple Intelligence works with ChatGPT, which then promptly crashes

OpenAI 12 Days
(Image credit: Future)

  • OpenAI demo ChatGPT integration in Apple Intelligence for day five of 12 Days of OpenAI
  • The ChatGPT service then goes down, but it's back up now
  • ChatGPT is ready to play a central role in Apple tech

OpenAI's 12 Days of OpenAI day five involved a demo of ChatGPT working with Apple Intelligence. The demo invoked the holiday season by sharing gifts with Apple and wearing holiday sweaters on the live stream. The announcement twined with Apple's release of iOS 18.2 and served to remind everyone that ChatGPT and Apple Intelligence have several deep links. OpenAI's models are making Siri smarter while powering several of the new features introduced by Apple on the same day.

Unfortunately, while OpenAI was celebrating its Apple integration, the fifth day was a bit marred as the ChatGPT service had a sizable outage. This meant that if you've been trying to use ChatGPT, Sora, APIs, or even Dall-E, right after the OpenAI announcement then you were hit with a currently unavailable screen or encountered errors when trying to do anything. The service is back up and running now.

Complex questions

Apple pitches Apple Intelligence as a way of making its devices more creative and intuitive to use. That includes many apps and tools on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Most notably, ChatGPT integration with Siri changes the voice assistant in remarkable ways.

The AI helps answer complex questions for Siri to match its more natural, fluid conversations. Instead of getting short, robotic answers, you can ask detailed questions and get thoughtful, context-aware responses.

The demonstration by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, product team member Miqdad Jaffer, and engineering manager Dave Cummings showcased how Siri could use ChatGPT to review documents and answer questions about it, with the answers coming from Apple's assistant.

They also showed how you can send information right to ChatGPT to dive deeper and how Siri can now open different ChatGPT tools like Canvas and DALL-E. The presenters then had Siri review the most recent ChatGPT model card, asking the voice assistant about the model's coding abilities, and then had Siri send the response to the ChatGPT app to code a program visualizing those abilities.

Using ChatGPT with Siri.

(Image credit: Apple)

OpenAI x Apple

For OpenAI, this collaboration is a reminder that ChatGPT is ready to play a central role in mainstream tech. Apple Intelligence is making ChatGPT part of the daily experience for Apple users. And in return, Apple also gets a better shot at keeping pace with competitors like Google Gemini and other rivals.

The festive sweaters worn by the presenters served an additional demonstration purpose, too. Using Apple Visual Intelligence, they had Siri process a photo of them in their sweaters, then had ChatGPT, via Apple Visual Intelligence, award one of them with the best sweater. Altman won.

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Eric Hal Schwartz
Contributor

Eric Hal Schwartz is a freelance writer for TechRadar with more than 15 years of experience covering the intersection of the world and technology. For the last five years, he served as head writer for Voicebot.ai and was on the leading edge of reporting on generative AI and large language models. He's since become an expert on the products of generative AI models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, Google Gemini, and every other synthetic media tool. His experience runs the gamut of media, including print, digital, broadcast, and live events. Now, he's continuing to tell the stories people want and need to hear about the rapidly evolving AI space and its impact on their lives. Eric is based in New York City.