👉 Background: OpenAI first launched ChatGPT-3 publicly in November 2023 and it revolutionised how many people work and play. From cooking recipes, to writing break-up messages and penning love poems, ChatGPT can seemingly do it all.

👉 What happened: Now, OpenAI has launched the latest iteration of its chatbot, called ChatGPT-4o. The “o” stands for “omni”. In other words, ChatGPT can now hold conversations across different formats of text, audio and video… in the same conversation. Yep, you can even create 'personalities' for the AI.. with some strange flirtation too.

👉 What else: This makes Siri look like she’s stuck in the stone age. So, it’s no surprise to hear that Apple is in talks with OpenAI about rolling out ChatGPT as a replacement to help stimulate its iPhone sales again.

What's the key learning?

💡Move over hardware, the phones of the future will appeal to customers based on their software capability.

💡 Each year, Apple, Samsung, Google roll out new phones with mini-upgrades (new camera, new memory). This minor upgrades create very little incentive to upgrade. In fact, smartphone sales contracted for 27 months in a row until late 2023.

💡But now, the material phone improvements are happening on the software side. For example, Samsung and Google has already integrated Gemini into its new devices. Chinese smartphones are also racing to put generative AI on their devices. This leaves Apple, who first launched Siri in 2011, left behind. So, it’s only a matter of time before Siri gets re-branded... Or fully replaced.