AI Daily: Apple said to use Google model to run new Siri assistant

Catch up on the top artificial intelligence news and commentary by Wall Street analysts on publicly traded companies in the space with this daily recap compiled by The Fly:

SIRI ASSISTANT: Apple (AAPL) is planning to use a 1.2 trillion parameter artificial intelligence model developed by Alphabet’s Google (GOOGL) to help power its overhaul of the Siri voice assistant, sources told Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman. The partners are finalizing an agreement that would see Apple pay roughly $1B annually for access to Google’s technology, though Apple still intends to keep developing new AI technology and hopes to eventually replace Google’s model with an in-house solution, the report added.

INVESTMENT IN ANTHROPIC: Google is in early discussions to deepen its investment in Anthropic, Business Insider’s Ben Bergman reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The new round of funding could value Anthropic at more than $350B, the report says. Amazon (AMZN) and Google have both invested in Anthropic, while Microsoft (MSFT) and Nvidia (NVDA) have invested in OpenAI.

IPO NOT IN THE CARDS: Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s CFO, said that an IPO is “not in the cards” currently, and that the company is prioritizing growth and R&D over immediate profitability, The Wall Street Journal’s Berber Jin reports. Friar, speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live conference, said “We are continuing to get the company into a state of constantly stepping up into the scale we are at, so I don’t want to get wrapped around an IPO axle.” OpenAI could achieve profitability quickly by reducing aggressive investments, due to “very healthy” gross margins, Friar said.

BUSINESS CUSTOMERS: OpenAI announced that more than 1 million business customers around the world are directly using OpenAI. This includes all organizations that actively pay OpenAI for business use — either through ChatGPT for Work, or through direct consumption of its models through our developer platform, OpenAI said. “We’re proud to work with category leaders in industries like financial services, healthcare, retail, and more, where our technology is making intelligence central to their customer experiences, internal operations, and team-level workflows. Our enterprise momentum is fueled in part by consumer adoption. With more than 800 million weekly users already familiar with ChatGPT, adoption and ROI within businesses is realized more rapidly-pilots are shorter and rollouts face less friction. We’re seeing this with the growth of ChatGPT for Work-we now have more than 7 million total ChatGPT for Work seats (up 40% in just 2 months). ChatGPT Enterprise seats specifically have grown 9x year-over-year.”

EMPLOYEE STOCK SALE: Crusoe, a startup developing a large data center in Texas for Oracle (ORCL) and OpenAI, is arranging an employee share sale that values the seven-year-old firm at around $13B, according to two people with knowledge of the transaction, The Information‘s Anissa Gardizy, Natasha Mascarenhas and Sri Muppidi report. The deal involves selling around $120M worth of employee shares and would value them at a 30% premium to an equity funding round Crusoe announced just weeks ago, these people said.

SUPERINTELLIGENCE: Microsoft (MSFT) AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman says Microsoft plans to focus on superintelligence that prioritizes human control and that he will lead a new superintelligence team, Semafor’s Reed Albergotti reports. “We cannot just accelerate at all costs. That would just be a crazy suicide mission,” Suleyman told Semafor this week. “We have to find ways of simultaneously having humanist superintelligence, which delivers the benefits that we’re all chasing for humans, and also accelerating technology at the same time.” Some of Microsoft AI’s key leaders, like chief scientist Karen Simonyan, will move over to the superintelligence team, and Suleyman will continue to lead Microsoft AI, Albergotti writes.