Apple has been all about AI for years, using it to enhance your photos, recognize and interpret your voice, remove subjects from images, and more. But the hottest trend today is with Generative AIas evidenced by services such as ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, Bard and Microsoft’s new Copilot feature in Office 365, and Apple is largely absent.
There are plenty of third-party apps that provide access to these generative AI services, but Apple didn’t seem interested in building its own generative AI like Meta and Google did or partnering up to integrate someone’s technology. else in its product like Microsoft. did with Open AI.
A new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claims that Apple hasn’t ignored this exciting new area of AI at all, it’s just been very quiet about it. Generative AI has apparently become a “major effort for Apple” in recent months. The company built its own framework for training generative AI tools, known as Ajax, and even used it to train its own chatbot service which some in-house engineers called “Apple GPT”. .
Unsurprisingly, one of Apple’s main efforts has been to improve the privacy of these tools. Tim Cook has spoken publicly about his belief that ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are something the company is “looking closely at”, he said AI tools will only be incorporated into Apple’s products. on a “very considered basis”. Internally, according to the report, Apple became concerned that it was missing a potential “primordial change” in the way we use digital devices, and so created the Ajax tool and ChatGPT-like chatbot for internal use.
Already, improvements to Search, Siri and Maps have been rolled out based on the Ajax system, and the company is currently developing a “big language model” similar to Open AI’s GPT-4, Meta’s Llama 2 or Google’s PaLM 2.
Apple’s internal testing chatbot, the “Apple GPT” if you will, was reportedly developed late last year by a very small team of engineers. After some initial security issues, the company has made the tool available to more employees, although it requires special permission to access it. The Bloomberg report says Apple employees say the tool essentially replicates the experience of Bard, ChatGPT, or Bing AI, without any special new technology, and is accessible through a streamlined web interface. This version of “Apple GPT” is only ever intended to be an internal tool, with no public release planned.
While Apple may never release a public “Apple GPT” tool, these revelations signal a big change within the company. Apple’s AI division, led by John Giannandrea, is working more closely with Craig Federighi’s software division and wants to make a major AI-related announcement next year.
Even without a major new AI product, it’s easy to see how work in this area could be used to improve the company’s existing products and services. These large language models are too large to work on a phone, and Apple has pushed to do more on your local device for better privacy. What if you could have a conversation with your HomePod like you do with ChatGPT? What if Siri could give you answers from the web in a more human and conversational way? How can generative AI artwork be used to help creators with Apple products like Logic or Final Cut Pro?
When it comes to generative AI, Apple may be a little late getting started, but it seems like the company is taking the technology very seriously. And in true Apple fashion, it will always make a grand entrance once it arrives.
