Apple products are receiving an integration with OpenAI's ChatGPT in December when iOS 18.2 rolls out, which should supercharge Siri and a few other features with smarter AI. On Monday, iOS 18.2 beta testers got a taste of how OpenAI could profit off of its Apple partnership.

Apple is adding the ability to upgrade to ChatGPT Plus directly within its Settings app, according to an update to the iOS 18.2 beta spotted by 9to5Mac. This will give Apple users a direct route to sign up for OpenAI's premium subscription plan, which costs $20 a month. This could push many users to sign up for ChatGPT Plus, the core revenue driver for OpenAI, especially considering that the free version of ChatGPT can be pretty limited.

Free ChatGPT users will not have access to OpenAI's latest models, such as o1-preview, or premium features like Advanced Voice Mode. They can only make two images with Dall-E per day and can't send as many messages to the AI chatbot as premium users.

One of the biggest lingering questions in Apple and OpenAI's partnership is how both companies expect to make money off the deal. Apparently, Apple is not offering any monetary payments to get integration from Sam Altman's startup but exposure; upgrading to ChatGPT Plus in the settings will suffice to give such exposure a lifetime if users really do follow up and sign up in numbers. Otherwise, it would make OpenAI responsible for a tsunami of a new free user of the ChatGPT system and ensure an increase in inference cost of the startup AI.

For example, it's unclear if Apple takes a cut of the revenue OpenAI rakes in from signups for ChatGPT Plus done through the Settings app. Apple might simply be gambling that carrying the best AI features of any mainstream smartphone is compensation enough for the free ad it's giving OpenAI, as it will just get enough customers to upgrade to its new handsets.

Yet, this is a weird arrangement. Apple is allowing ChatGPT to drive much of its biggest AI updates to date, but the iPhone maker isn't making it an exclusive deal. The company says it will be integrating AI models from other developers, possibly including Google's Gemini.

The background to this integration: OpenAI is raising money and losing key executives at a rate that would have been unheard of before, with the company in July hiring Apple's VP for the development of Siri to serve as its new president, where she will work closely with Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever, both co-founders.