Two partnerships were unveiled at Apple's yearly Worldwide Developer Conference on Monday; one on stage and one in the fine-print. A partnership with OpenAI to use GPT 4.0 within Siri's Apple Intelligence was openly publicised, but use of Google chips to build the AI tools was not.
Initially, it would seem as though the two companies are at odds. Apple would be set to compete with Google's Gemini over their AI systems, while the OpenAI partnership could potentially mean reduced access to customer data through Siri.
However, a technical document published by Apple after the event reveals that in order to build their AI models, Apple used its own framework software. This software depended on various pieces of Apple's own hardware, but also tensor processing chips (TPCs). These are exclusively available for purchase through Google's cloud. Google is among various companies competing with Nvidia's AI-capable chips, which have been dominating the market recently.
Apple did not immediately reply after Reuters requested comment. It has not detailed how much it depends on third-party chips for the development of its new AI system.