"Apple was apparently caught unprepared by the rise of generative AI. Now the company is investing billions of dollars to catch up.
Apple was badly surprised by ChatGPT. CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple has been working on generative AI for years. "But I can say with certainty that Apple executives were caught off guard by the industry's sudden AI fever and have been scrambling since the end of last year to make up for lost time," writes Apple expert Mark Gurman, quoting an insider as saying : "It's viewed internally as a pretty big mistake". In fact, Apple has not yet launched any significant new AI features that have similar qualities to OpenAI, Microsoft or Google.
Now Apple has enough resources to start catching up. John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice presidents in charge of AI and software development, are spearheading the effort.
One billion dollars a year should be available for the project.
A language model called Ajax
Apple has already developed its own language model called Ajax and the internal chatbot Apple GPT, but OpenAI's lead in time cannot be made up so quickly, even with a lot of money.
It is therefore not yet clear when Apple's own AI will be able to significantly improve previously moderately successful products such as Siri.
Ajax now serves as the basis for new products. According to Gurman, Giannandrea's team is currently revamping Siri in the hope of launching a genAI version next year. Federighi's software engineering group is working to build AI into the next version of iOS. It should be filled with functions that are also based on the company's large language model. Then Apple products should also be able to complete sentences or formulate their own texts.
AI on the device or in the cloud?
Apple's software development teams are also considering integrating generative AI into development tools like Xcode to help app developers write new applications faster. The model is Microsoft's GitHub Copilot, which is very successful in making autocompletion suggestions to developers when writing code.
Apple is also working on adding AI to as many applications as possible. This includes new features for Apple Music, including auto-generated playlists (something Spotify introduced earlier this year in collaboration with OpenAI), as well as the company's productivity apps.
According to Gurman, the question of how generative AI should be used is being discussed internally: completely on the device, in a cloud-based environment or in an intermediate solution.
An on-device approach would work faster and help protect privacy, but deploying Apple's LLMs over the cloud would enable more advanced operations.
OpenAI is also working on a device that had AI built in directly. At this point, Apple could have advantages with its hardware expertise and strong position in the market. "Generative AI has quickly become more than just a buzzword and will be central to the next decades of computing. Apple knows it can't afford to sit back," writes Gurman." [1]
1. Eine Milliarde Dollar für die KI-Aufholjagd. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (online)Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung GmbH. Oct 22, 2023. Von Holger Schmidt
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