Brad Lightcap, OpenAI COO, joins 'Squawk on the Street' to discuss the company's relationship with Apple, how OpenAI benefits economically from this partnership, and much more.

San Francisco

The release of Open AI's ChatGPT has accelerated the development of artificial intelligence and warnings about its impact on society.

Rise of AI

OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap, discussed the company's partnership with Apple and its impact on the integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into devices. In a recent interview, Lightcap expressed enthusiasm for the collaboration, noting that this marks a significant development in AI accessibility. The partnership will allow users to engage in sophisticated interactions, such as using AI to understand images captured by device cameras, enhancing consumer experience.

While the collaboration with Apple does not involve a direct financial transaction like Google's relationship with Apple, OpenAI is focusing on developing innovative products. The company aims to explore new horizons in AI technology, creating dynamic user experiences. Lightcap highlighted a shift in how software operates, emphasizing the potential of AI to handle complex tasks and interactions on a device, thanks to new AI models like O1, which can reason and process complex problems.

Apple's integration with AI is expected to transform how users interact with devices and apps. This transformation includes the introduction of more human-like and interactive interfaces, such as advanced voice modes available in ChatGPT. Lightcap envisions a future where it becomes standard for users to speak to devices and have them perform complex tasks fluidly. The adoption of these interfaces is likely to revolutionize the user experience, marking an important milestone in technological advancement.



OpenAI chief breaks down Apple partnership, new AI models

Joining us now, it's a CNBC exclusive, OpenAI's Chief Operating Officer, Brad Lightcap. Brad, good to see you. Good to see you too. And nice to learn that you're a Mets fan as well. I could spend the entire interview on that, but I think the rest of our viewers might be a bit disappointed. You have a fairly large remit as COO, but certainly partnerships are one of the key things I know you've focused on. So I'd love to start with Apple. A lot of questions there, exactly what the relationship is in terms of your help with Apple Intelligence. What can you tell us about what the partnership means for OpenAI and what Apple conceivably will get out of it? Yeah, well, it's great to be here. Good to see you again. Apple's obviously an amazing company. We're really thrilled to be part of Apple Intelligence. We think it's a big step forward, both for Apple. It's a first step, but it's a big step. It's the first time that we're going to have AI really start to integrate into the device. If you think about kind of how people have used AI to date, it's mostly been accessing it through apps and really, really simple kind of services. But for the first time now, you can do really, really interesting things on the device. So you can actually take a picture, for example, through the camera and actually have ChatGPT understand what's going on in that image. And we think that's going to create tremendous value for consumers. And for the 250 million people that use ChatGPT every week, we think it's just going to be another way for them to experience it. Yeah. So, you know, from a perspective, obviously, revenues of your company continue to go up sharply, but investors, your private investors, certainly are also focused on margins over time. So how do you benefit economically here? This is not a relationship, for example, the Google search relationship, where Google's paying Apple an enormous amount of money every year. That's not the case here, correct? Correct. Yeah. Look, the way we think about it is really around product. We don't yet know, I think, what the great product experiences with AI are going to look like. I think those are yet to be created. I said to our team the other day, I think it's the most dynamic time in technology and the history of technology that I can think of to be building product. It's a phase shift, right? We're at the beginning of an entirely new era for how software works. And so I think exploring that frontier and what it means to actually be able to interact with these devices in this very human-like way, all of that is yet to be discovered. And that's where we're right. And I understand that, but I'm trying to understand. I pay you guys $20 a month now. Thank you. You're welcome. And I'm enjoying it. But if I have Apple intelligence on this phone, am I still going to want to pay you the 20 bucks a month? I think so. I think there's going to be a range of workloads that you're going to want AI to be able to take off your plate. Some of those are going to be very simple. They're going to be on device. But a lot of them are going to be really big, complex workflows that you're going to want to ship off to more powerful models. Good example, we recently released a new model called O1. It's a different type of model. So in contrast to GPT-3, GPT-4, O1 is the first model that can actually reason. And so what that means is it actually can think about a problem. It can break down a complex problem into different steps. And so if you think about even giving your AI a simple task, like help me plan a trip, that's a series of actual underlying tasks that you actually want more complex, higher sophistication intelligence to be able to handle. So that's the type of experience we're going to bring. So that would be more for the pay model for GPT, as opposed to potentially for Apple intelligence. But you're still going to be using it there. I wonder when you think about when so many people who own Apple, for example, stock, think about, well, how is this going to change the nature of the interaction with the device, with the use of apps? How do you think about it? Is it going to change significantly? I think it will. I think interfaces are going to change. I think we're going to have a much more human-like interface, a much more interactive interface. One of the really cool things you've probably seen in chat GPT, you can now access our advanced voice mode. So it's for the first time you actually have a system that you can talk to fluidly, like you and I are talking right now. You can interrupt it. You can have it tell you jokes. You can make it sound more serious, more funny. Those interfaces will become the norm. I think a few years from now, it will be unusual that you'd walk up to a screen and not expect to be able to talk to it like a person and ask it to do arbitrarily complex things. And so we're just at the beginning of this, but that's what we're really excited about.

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