Apple asked a federal judge to keep its trade secrets lawsuit alive Wednesday, saying OpenAI’s motion to dismiss relied “on distortion, speculation, and improper extrinsic evidence.”
Apple’s 32-page opposition brief, filed Wednesday, doubles down on Apple’s original accusations against two former Apple employees now working for OpenAI. It also sets up a key court hearing scheduled for October.
OpenAI’s first smart speaker will supposedly look like a “doughnut that’s roughly the size of a hockey puck,” according to a new Bloomberg report. This odd design will help the speaker stand out from the competition.
It will also apparently enable the speaker to work in “different positions.”
Apple’s trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI names two former employees and Jony Ive’s startup but scrupulously avoids mentioning the former Apple design chief by name.
This isn’t a legal oversight. It comes down to a complicated mix of factors, including Ive’s closeness with Laurene Powell Jobs and the lousy optics of Apple targeting its most famous designer.
OpenAI’s probable first device will likely be a portable smart speaker with a winning personality and features that make it seem like a living creature. The company envisions a screenless device that will “serve as a humanlike AI companion that lives in the home,” according to a new report citing anonymous sources.
While previous rumors indicated OpenAI wants to build a device to challenge the iPhone, this sounds like more of a threat to Apple’s HomePod, Amazon’s Alexa devices and other smart speakers.
Oh, and the thing might actually move to make it seem more lifelike. (Let’s hope it doesn’t give off an Existenz game pod vibe.)
Apple seems to have gone to unusual lengths to keep one man out of its trade-secret lawsuit against OpenAI: Jony Ive.
However, the legal battle could end up with Apple’s former design chief taking the stand. And that could rattle Apple’s cordial relationship with Ive, who’s helping OpenAI build AI-powered gadgets that threaten the iPhone’s dominance.
Apple sued OpenAI in federal court on Friday, accusing the ChatGPT maker of orchestrating a broad campaign to obtain Apple’s confidential hardware technology by hiring its former employees.
It relates to an effort by OpenAI to develop its own devices with AI built in — products that might someday replace the iPhone and other smartphones.
OpenAI hasn’t been subtle about its plans to compete with Apple hardware, especially after it began working closely with Jony Ive, Apple’s former design chief.
Apple doesn’t often lose vice presidents, but something unexpected happened this week: Paul Meade, who spent about seven years building the Vision Pro and shaping Apple’s smart glasses plan, is reportedly leaving for OpenAI.
If you own a Vision Pro or are waiting for Apple’s smart glasses, this is the executive exit that should concern you. Meade doesn’t just hold a title — he shipped the headset and was also planning what comes next.
Meade’s resume reads like a hardware lifer. He joined Apple in 2010, working on the iPad before eventually moving into the iPhone team in 2012. Fast forward to 2017, and he crossed over to the Vision Products Group.
Two years later, he was handling all of Vision Pro’s hardware engineering and kept that job for almost a decade. Now, Meade is heading over to OpenAI’s hardware division, where he’ll work on the company’s upcoming AI devices.
Apple is yet to publicly confirm any of this. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman broke the story, but neither Apple nor OpenAI has commented yet.
With Meade leaving Apple, his longtime deputy — Fletcher Rothkopf — who already leads the design team for the Vision Pro and the much-rumored smart glasses, is taking his place. That’s a serious step for someone who’s never run the show solo and a sign of how much pressure Apple is under.
If this were the first Apple exec to leave the company for OpenAI, it wouldn’t be that big a deal. Apple has seen its watch designers drift towards Jony Ive’s orbit for a while, as well as some execs join the likes of Meta.
But losing a VP from its engineering department to a rival company is new. At OpenAI, Meade will rejoin Apple’s former hardware and design lead Jony Ive, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey. This is the same team OpenAI bought for $6.5 billion last year.
Sam Altman has previously hinted that OpenAI’s first device would be something less intrusive than an iPhone. But rumors have it that the project has struggled to get past the concept stage.
This is exactly where Meade comes in. His entire career has revolved around shipping products, not just sketching them.
The timing isn’t as random as you may think. Meade’s exit follows the hardware reorganization Apple did, with John Ternus stepping up as the CEO. This was followed by Apple’s chip chief, Johny Srouji, being put in charge of Apple’s hardware engineering team.
It pushed several VPs, including Meade, answerable to a new layer under Ternus. That’s a demotion in spirit for some, even if no one called it that. For an executive who spent years effectively owning a product, that’s exactly the type of change that makes often someone look for a new job.
More than the drama at Apple, here’s the thing that should sting more: the Vision Pro didn’t sell in volume. Unsurprisingly, Apple has reportedly toned down its headset efforts, with a redesign not expected before 2028 or 2029.
Instead, Apple could be focusing on a pair of lighter, display-free smart glasses intended to compete against Ray-Ban Meta. That program was Meade’s, and so were the long-range AR glasses planned for later this decade. Meade’s departure is more than a job change — he could be taking a map of where Apple’s wearables could go next.
It isn’t all bad news on Apple’s side. The company is still reportedly working on camera-equipped AirPods and a tabletop robot. A wearable pendant is also somewhere in the pipeline. Despite modest sales figures, Rothkopf has a team that’s already shipped a headset. But OpenAI has just hired the person who knows what it takes to get the next one out the door.
Apple will now most likely need to prove with its much-rumored smart glasses that losing Meade didn’t cost it anything.
OpenAI just gave its Codex for Mac programming app a feature called Appshots that makes copy-pasting code or describing what’s on the screen unnecessary. Just press Command twice, and the AI assistant automatically takes a screenshot and captures text from your window, including scrollable content that isn’t visible.
Appshots is the headline addition in this week’s Codex update, and it’s only available on Macs for now. Think of it as giving your AI assistant a pair of eyes, instead of always explaining what you are looking at.
A once promising partnership between Apple and OpenAI could be heading for a legal confrontation, according to a report published Thursday.
OpenAI has been providing artificial intelligence services for iPhone and Mac users since 2024, but the deal is souring behind the scenes, with the software developer reportedly unhappy that it’s not getting much benefit from the partnership.
Apple will let iPhone and Mac users choose between multiple AI models for different tasks, according to a report published Tuesday. The strategy would allow users to select whichever third-party AI system they prefer to generate and edit text and images for them.
It’s a brilliant solution to the ongoing battle between companies to develop the best AI models. It won’t matter whether OpenAI, Google, Perplexity, etc., wins that fight — because Apple also wins.
Less than a month after its initial announcement, ChatGPT has started rolling out ads for users on its free and Go tiers. For now, the ads will only appear for 18+ users in the US.
With this move, ChatGPT becomes the first major AI chatbot to introduce advertising.
Apple might be slow to jump on the AI bandwagon, but internally, the company “runs on Anthropic at this point.” Apparently, the company was also ready to rebuild Siri around Claude, but the deal fell through at the last moment.
“Anthropic is powering a lot of the stuff Apple’s doing internally in terms of product development and a lot of their internal tools,” revealed Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman in the TBPN’s Technology’s daily show.
This week on the Cult of Mac podcast: It’s finally official — Siri is getting a long-awaited AI brain transplant, courtesy of Google Gemini.
We discuss the pros and cons of the deal, but more importantly, we express our sincere hope that Siri will actually work in the future.
Also on the Cult of Mac podcast:
Listen to this week’s episode of the Cult of Mac podcast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video stream, embedded below.
OpenAI’s first consumer hardware device could be an AirPods replacement. The AI-powered earbuds, internally called “Sweetpea,” is reportedly the priority focus for former Apple design chief Jony Ive’s team.
OpenAI’s earbuds could debut as early as September, with the company estimating shipments to reach 40 million to 50 million units in the first year.
Going hands-on with the new ChatGPT Atlas browser for Mac makes it crystal clear that Safari risks becoming irrelevant. Our browsing habits are evolving fast, and Apple’s browser just isn’t keeping up
For years, Safari has been my go-to browser on the Mac due to its speed and power efficiency. But with Apple falling behind in the artificial intelligence wars, and a new breed of AI-boosted browsers coming on strong, that could change. I went hands-on with ChatGPT Atlas to see what the future of internet browsing looks like.
ChatGPT maker OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Inc., a company founded by former Apple employees who worked on Workflow, the software Apple acquired in 2017 and renamed “Shortcuts.”
At Software Applications, the team has been hard at work on Sky, an AI-powered assistant that can perform actions across any app on your Mac. The acquisition should give OpenAI a leg up when it comes to integrating ChatGPT into Macs.
OpenAI released its ChatGPT Atlas browser for Mac on Tuesday, making it easy to use the AI chatbot wherever you go online. When using the free browser to visit a website, you can tap into ChatGPT’s knowledge to provide more information about whatever’s on the page.
For example, after searching for a top Airbnb listing in a certain locale, you could ask ChatGPT for best hikes in the area or tell the chatbot to assemble an itinerary for a three-day trip — right within the browser. An agent mode, available to paid ChatGPT users, can go even further.
However, while OpenAI says it built in safeguards to mitigate the dangers of allowing an AI to act for you on logged-in websites, the company admits that using agent mode carries risks. And there’s still the common AI problem of hallucinations.
This week on Cult of Mac’s podcast: After OpenAI’s Sora app races to the top of the App Store charts, it’s time to consider how fantastic and terrifying it really is.
The iPhone-only app produces startlingly photorealistic videos of wacky things like Pikachu as a World War II soldier and iJustine wrestling an elephant. Will we ever be able to believe our eyes again?
Also on The CultCast:
Listen to this week’s episode of The CultCast in the Podcasts app or your favorite podcast app. (Be sure to subscribe and leave us a review if you like it!) Or watch the video version, embedded below.
OpenAI’s efforts to create and sell an “AI companion” device reportedly have serious obstacles to overcome. These are existential, including how the company can find enough computing resources to enable the artificial intelligence devices to function.
That’s good news for Apple, as there have been predictions that products designed specifically for AI might someday take the place of the iPhone and other smartphones.
OpenAI introduced the Sora iPhone app Tuesday, and by Friday, it had already hit the No. 1 spot on Apple’s Top Free Apps list. The secret of the new AI video app’s appeal? It’s a lot of fun, letting users create hilarious short videos with a simple text description.
Watch some of the hilarious (and amazing) videos people have already created, there go make your own.
Elon Musk’s xAI filed a lawsuit on Monday against Apple and OpenAI claiming they’re conspiring to stifle competition in artificial intelligence apps.
This comes two weeks after Musk took to social media to complain that the No. 1 Top Free App in the iPhone App Store at the time was OpenAI’s ChatGPT, not the Grok app from xAI, an AI startup that the billionaire owns.
Apple’s struggle to develop artificial intelligence might reach the point where the iPhone-maker will need to outsource one of its core technologies: Siri. A promised AI upgrade for the voice assistant may be powered by large language models created by Anthropic or OpenAI, not Apple itself, according to an unconfirmed report published Monday.
But this is only a possibility — no decision has been made.
OpenAI and Jony Ive’s io have removed all public details about the latter’s acquisition. The much-hyped video announcing the acquisition is also no longer live on YouTube. Contrary to rumors, this is not due to the deal between the two companies falling apart.
The issue stems from a trademark dispute over the name “io” used by Ive’s firm.
Former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman posted a video and statement Wednesday teasing a mysterious AI hardware prototype that will apparently come within a year as OpenAI buys io, Ivy’s fledgling device company, for nearly $6.5 billion in an all-stock deal.
“Jony recently gave me one of the prototypes of the device for the first time to take home, and I’ve been able to live with it,” Altman says in the video. “And I think it is the coolest piece of technology that the world will have ever seen.”
Trouble is, their video and statement are more like love-fests to each other and the San Francisco Bay Area than they are sources of information about what to expect from actual products — as in what earlier reports called “the iPhone of artificial intelligence.”
If the U.S. federal judge orders Google to sell Chrome, OpenAI would be willing to buy it. Nick Turley, the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, revealed this during his testimony in the ongoing Google antitrust trial.
When asked if OpenAI would buy Chrome, he replied, “Yes, we would, and so would many other parties.”