Apple drops out of talks to join OpenAI investment round

Apple investment in OpenAI: The tech giant, Apple left negotiations to participate in an OpenAI funding round. The company was expected to raise about $6.5 billion from this round, according to the Wall Street Journal on Friday.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple had recently backed out of the round, which was scheduled to close next week.

Other companies, such as Microsoft and Nvidia, have also expressed their interest in participating in the funding round from OpenAI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Microsoft plans to invest approximately $1 billion after previously investing $13 billion in the company.

In the previous month, the Wall Street Journal had first reported that Apple was in the talks for the investment in OpenAI. As part of the OpenAI's new fund-raising effort, it could value the company above $100 billion.

OpenAI declined to provide any comments regarding this. While on the other end, Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the back off from the investment.

The high valuation is an effect of the OpenAI’s AI arms race which was initiated with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. This has led to provoking different companies across various industries to invest billions in technology to remain ahead of the competition and win a major market share.

Earlier, OpenAI was working with Apple to integrate the ChatGPT AI chatbot in the upcoming iOS 18 for selective models. Earlier in June, Apple announced its Apple Intelligence at the WWDC 2024. The existing partnership between Apple and OpenAI would bring AI features and a major part of the upcoming Apple Intelligence functionality will be the upgraded Siri, which will be offering answers to the users, which are powered by AI.

If in case Siri fails to answer the questions asked by the users, it will ask for help from Chat GPT. The user will not be required to access the chatbot separately. As per previous reports, the collaboration between OpenAI for ChatGPT’s integration into Apple iOS 18 does not have monetary bearings.

(with Reuters inputs)