OpenAI and Apple have moved to dismiss a lawsuit by Elon Musk's xAI alleging that ChatGPT's integration into a "handful" of iPhone features violated antitrust laws by giving OpenAI a monopoly on prompts and Apple a new path to block rivals in the smartphone industry.
The lawsuit was filed in August after Musk raged on X about Apple never listing Grok on its editorially curated "Must Have" apps list, which ChatGPT frequently appeared on.
According to Musk, Apple linking ChatGPT to Siri and other native iPhone features gave OpenAI exclusive access to billions of prompts that only OpenAI can use as valuable training data to maintain its dominance in the chatbot market. However, OpenAI and Apple are now mocking Musk's math in court filings, urging the court to agree that xAI's lawsuit is doomed.
As OpenAI argued, the estimates in xAI's complaint seemed "baseless," with Musk hesitant to even "hazard a guess" at what portion of the chatbot market is being foreclosed by the OpenAI/Apple deal.
xAI suggested that the ChatGPT integration may give OpenAI "up to 55 percent" of the potential chatbot prompts in the market, which could mean anywhere from 0 to 55 percent, OpenAI and Apple noted.
Musk's company apparently arrived at this vague estimate by doing "back-of-the-envelope math," and the court should reject his complaint, OpenAI argued. That math "was evidently calculated by assuming that Siri fields '1.5 billion user requests per day globally,' then dividing that quantity by the 'total prompts for generative AI chatbots in 2024,'"—"apparently 2.7 billion per day," OpenAI explained.
These estimates "ignore the facts" that "ChatGPT integration is only available on the latest models of iPhones, which allow users to opt into the integration," OpenAI argued. And for any user that opts in, they must link their ChatGPT account for OpenAI to train on their data, OpenAI said, further restricting the potential prompt pool.