Apple is said to be negotiating AI technology with Google

According to a media report, Apple is negotiating with Google to integrate the internet company’s AI technology into its iPhones. This concerns the new Google software called Gemini, the financial service Bloomberg reported on Monday evening. Negotiations are underway to create a number of new iPhone features based on this, it was said, citing informed people. Apple also had discussions with ChatGPT developer OpenAI. The companies initially did not comment on the report.

The chatbot ChatGPT started the current hype around artificial intelligence more than a year ago. AI programs such as ChatGPT and Gemini are trained with enormous amounts of information and can, for example, formulate sentences at the language level of a human and generate images from text specifications. The principle behind this is that they estimate word by word how a sentence should proceed – or use visual elements from the recorded data.

Google and Apple have long had individual AI-based features in their services and devices, but the success of so-called generative AI like ChatGPT increased pressure on the tech giants to add similar features. Google first countered with the chatbot Bard and then updated the software with Gemini. New AI features are expected from Apple at its annual developer conference WWDC, where the next software for the company’s devices is traditionally presented in June.

A partnership with Apple could help Google make Gemini AI more popular in the competition with OpenAI. At the same time, the collaboration between the tech heavyweights could trigger competition watchdogs, which are already keeping an eye on both companies, into action. It can also be seen as a sign that Apple is not as far along in developing AI software as the iPhone company would like.

According to media reports, Apple recently abandoned its car project after about a decade. It was also said that some of the affected software developers would have to work on AI programs instead. Google was recently criticized for a flaw with Gemini: the software generated images of non-white Nazi soldiers and non-white American colonists through diversity settings that were not adjusted to the context. The feature for generating images from text specifications was then disabled for the time being. (rbu/sda/awp/dpa)