Future expansions to Apple Intelligence may involve more AI partners, paid subscriptions
Apple is considering a paid future for aspects of its Apple Intelligence service that would expand to a subscription model for additional features and more AI partners.
The introduction of Apple Intelligence has offered a wealth of AI features at no cost for owners of the top iPhone 15 models. However, as Apple Intelligence expands to more services and more partners, a subscription model for some offerings could be ahead.
In addition to a potential subscription for certain advanced Apple Intelligence capabilities, the company has already positioned itself to get a cut of subscriptions it generates for the paid levels of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and other third-party AI services.
Currently, the company offers free and anonymous access to OpenAI’s GPT-4o technology without setting up a ChatGPT account. The agreement with Apple also prevents OpenAI from using data from Apple users’ queries to train its technology.
Apple has made the option of passing a query on to ChatGPT available in Apple Intelligence if the scope of the query is outside the built-in models’ parameters. This would include requests requiring specialized knowledge, such as medical or legal databases, or larger queries that are not part of the on-device Large Language Models (LLMs).
There is currently no timetable for the introduction of any additional paid features, assuming the report is accurate. Apple is likely to limit any subscription opportunities until a larger set of users have iPhones and other devices that can run Apple Intelligence, which would develop over the next several years.
