Earlier this year, Apple and Google began discussions to bring many generative AI features to the upcoming iOS 18 operating system. Now, the Tim Cook-led company has reportedly "renewed" talks with OpenAI to bring generative AI capabilities to iPhones.

According to a report by Bloomberg's Mark Gurnman, Apple and OpenAI had begun discussions about a deal earlier this year, but work has been minimal since then. The report states that Apple and OpenAI are in talks to power a chatbot-like feature in iOS 18.

Meanwhile, Apple has also continued discussions with Google to license its Gemini AI chatbot. The report states that Apple could ultimately reach an agreement with both OpenAI and Google, or choose one vendor for its chatbot.

According to previous reports, Apple is also negotiating with Baidu to bring generative AI capabilities to users in China, as Google doesn't have a presence in the country.

Apple's iOS 18 is being touted as one of the "biggest" software updates in the iPhone maker's history. As it does every year, Apple is likely to unveil its iOS 18 operating system at its Worldwide Developers Conference, while the new update could first be rolled out on the upcoming iPhone 16 series later this year.

Apple's AI model could be entirely ‘on-device’:

Gurnman had also recently revealed in his Power On newsletter that Apple is working on developing a large language model (LLM) that will be entirely on-device, meaning it will be powered by a processor inside the phones rather than run from the cloud. The use of an on-device model means that the AI chatbot will be less powerful and knowledgeable than most commercial chatbots, such as ChatGPT or Gemini, which are backed by huge servers and trained on billions of parameters.