According to reports, Apple has entered the AI arms race. Mark Gurman stated that the Mac and iPhone maker is developing an artificial intelligence platform as well as its own chatbot. Gurman’s unnamed sources describe a vital piece of technology known as “Ajax,” which serves as a foundation for developing big language models such as those used by ChatGPT.
Ajax was also used by a small engineering team at Apple to create a chatbot that some internally refer to as “Apple GPT.” Ajax was purportedly created in 2022 to “unify machine learning development at Apple,” whereas the chatbot currently used by internal teams appears to be a more recent development. According to Bloomberg, Ajax is built on Google Jax and runs on Google Cloud.
The company has remained conspicuously mute on artificial intelligence. At its Worldwide Developers Conference, the corporation made no mention of AI, instead focusing on advances in machine learning. Many consumers have complained that Siri, Apple’s voice assistant introduced in 2011, isn’t as sophisticated as competitors like as Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.
Apple is concerned about the rapid adoption of generative AI technologies and is concerned about missing a potentially pivotal shift in how devices operate. Apple’s head of machine learning and AI, John Giannandera, and Craig Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, are driving the charge.
According to Gurman, Apple Maps, Search, and Siri have already witnessed AI advancements based on Ajax. The question with the so-called “Apple GPT” is how it might appear in consumer projects.
Currently, the chatbot, which is only accessible via a web interface, is only being utilised internally by a small team, and supposedly requires employees to be rubber-stamped by higher-ups in order to gain access. Furthermore, the iPhone maker is not allowing the bot’s output to be used for consumer-facing initiatives.
According to Gurman’s sources, what Apple’s bot does not do yet is anything new. It’s comparable to Bing Chat, ChatGPT, and others, however it lacks distinguishing features.
It’s unclear how, if at all, the company will apply this AI technology in consumer-facing activities. Gurman mentions Siri as the obvious choice, although the cupertino giant has stated that AI has ended up in areas such as crash prevention and fall detection. But Siri, with its emphasis on privacy, has fallen short of its predecessors. Making it smarter with AI may make it a little more useful.
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