Elon Musk Threatens To Ban Use Of iPhone In His Companies

Tech billionaire and X (formerly Twitter) boss, Elon Musk, has threatened to ban the use of Apple devices at his companies after the iPhone maker announced a partnership with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT.

Musk made this announcement on his X handle on Monday after Apple resolved to pair OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Siri at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference held on Monday.

“If Apple integrates OpenAI at the OS level, then Apple devices will be banned at my companies. That is an unacceptable security violation,” Musk said in his post.

“And visitors will have to check their Apple devices at the door, where they will be stored in a Faraday cage,” added Musk, who is also the CEO of electric vehicle maker Tesla and rocket maker SpaceX.

“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!

“Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river,” Musk added.

Prior to Musk’s post criticism of the move, Apple promised its users that unlike ordinary usage of ChatGPT direct from OpenAI’s platform, users’ private information and their queries will not be logged or stored.

In one example shown at the Apple annual conference, Siri recommended that the iPhone users consult ChatGPT for further dinner recipe ideas, flagging all the way that these new answers were coming from OpenAI’s chatbot and advising users to ‘check important info for mistakes.’

The wider service being offered is called Apple Intelligence, which will have its own image generating AI dubbed ‘Image Playground.’ It also transforms Apple’s calculator app into living piece of scratch paper to do complex math problems on.

Apple CEO Tim Cook said that one of the five criteria Apple Intelligence needed to meet was being ‘private.’

According to the presentation, Apple Intelligence ‘will be keeping users’ personal information on their devices rather than uploading it to an Apple-owned cloud due to the company’s powerful new M chips.

Musk made it clear in a subsequent post that he didn’t buy that idea.

Replies to Musk’s post were filled with people begging him to release his own phone brand using either X branding or Tesla branding.

‘’Honestly at this point, we need Tesla or X to come out with a phone powered by Starlink. I would switch in a heartbeat,’’ right-wing film director Robby Starbuck wrote.

‘’I don’t trust Sam Altman and I don’t want his tech inside my phone, inside my office or near my family.’’

Elon Musk cofounded OpenAI with Sam Altman back in 2015, and the company was alleged to be a non-profit to serve as a check on the potential threats artificial intelligence could pose to humanity.

Their relationship went sour when OpenAI executives refused a buyout offer from Tesla in 2018, causing Musk to leave the company.

In March, Musk sued OpenAI and Altman, its current CEO, over an alleged betrayal of the company’s founding aims of benefiting humanity rather than pursuing profit.

Sam Altman responded to Musk’s lawsuit in a podcast, saying that he didn’t believe it was about OpenAI being open source or not.

OpenAI’s founders published a series of emails from Musk where he supported the company’s pivot to a mix between non-profit and for-profit, Business Insider reported.

Musk also joked on X that he would drop the lawsuit if the company changed its name to ClosedAI.