Elon Musk, who has threatened to ban his employees and visitors from using Apple devices at the companies he owns said in a June 10 post on X that he is no longer a fan of the iPhone, iPad, and Mac because of concerns about whether Apple new partnership with ChatGPT protects user’s data with producer OpenAI.
But the situation in which Elon Musk finds himself – one of the richest men in the world, the CEO of X, the head of the development company Grok, the founder of ChatGPT competitor and OpenAI – can be more complicated than a simple security issue.
Elon, who has a reputation for conceit, has now called out his social media monitoring community members, saying his claims are inaccurate and misleading. And at least one security researcher said Musk’s security warning appears false, based on information Apple and OpenAI have shared so far about how their companies handle privacy.
Elon Musk drops lawsuit against OpenAI
Here’s what occurred: Apple CEO Tim Cook and his team said on Monday at the company’s developer conference that generative AI technologies will be available to iPhone, iPad, and Mac customers in future Apple releases.
The news included an agreement to allow Apple users to use OpenAI’s popular AI chat ChatGPT generation. Then Musk made his threat. “If Apple integrates OpenAI into the operating system, Apple devices will be removed from my businesses.
Elon posted the message on Monday on X, formerly known as Twitter. “This is an unacceptable breach of security.” He also said in tweets that visitors to his companies, which include Tesla, X, chatbot xAI, tunneling company Boring Company, and rocket maker SpaceX, should “check their Apple devices at the door where they are kept in a Faraday cage.”
“Faraday cages are enclosures that protect everything inside from electromagnetic fields. He did not provide evidence to support speculation about potential security risks. Instead, in a follow-up message on Monday, Musk disparaged Apple for contracting with an outside manufacturer of Large Language Models (LLM), which enables the AI functions of Gen.
He also said he might make his phone to combat it, without saying what it is. “It is patently absurd that Apple is not smart enough to make its own AI, yet somehow manages to ensure that OpenAI protects your security and privacy,” Musk wrote. “Apple doesn’t know what’s going on when they hand over your data to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.”
Elon Musk Vs OpenAI
Elon Musk, who has worked to portray himself as an advocate for users and humanity, also did not mention his legal beef with OpenAI, which was detailed in his February lawsuit. In that lawsuit, he argued that the San Francisco-based startup, led by CEO Sam Altman, abandoned its core mission of developing artificial intelligence to benefit humanity and instead focused on profit.
In response, OpenAI disputed Musk’s account in a lengthy blog post on its website on March 5, saying the billionaire investor was angry that his 2018 takeover of OpenAI was rejected. It included Musk’s demand to become CEO and majority shareholder so he could turn it into a “profit-making entity.”
The OpenAI post also cited some of Elon Musk’s emails that appeared to support the company’s claim that Musk knew OpenAI needed to become a for-profit company if it wanted to raise money to realize its dreams of building an artificial general artificial intelligence (AGI), artificial intelligence that equals or exceeds human intelligence.
In 2017, Elon said in an email that OpenAI needed to raise at least $1 billion in funding. Musk withdrew his lawsuit on Tuesday, “a day before a San Francisco state judge was to consider whether to dismiss it, OpenAI declined to comment on Musk’s comments about the Apple partnership or his decision to drop the lawsuit.
