Beyond Siri: Apple's [Late] Leap into Generative AI with Apple GPT

The development of this AI product is being led by Apple's AI chief, John Giannandrea, who reports directly to Apple CEO Tim Cook. Giannandrea established a team that works on conversational AI four years ago, and the work has since ramped up.

Apple's AI product is being developed under an "Ajax" framework for large language models. The company has an internal chatbot, referred to as "Apple GPT" by some engineers, which is used for product prototyping and can answer questions about the data that was used to train it. This chatbot, however, is not intended for consumer use and requires special permission for Apple employees to use it.

The Ajax framework is reportedly more capable than the prior-generation ChatGPT 3.5, reportedly having been trained on more than 200 billion parameters. However, as of September 2023, OpenAI's newer models are allegedly more powerful than Ajax.

Apple's strategy for creating a generative AI product for consumers is still opaque. The company is experimenting with enhancements to Siri, software that generates videos and images, and multimodal AI technology that works with images, videos, and text. Apple is also said to be spending millions of dollars a day on conversational AI research, as training language models requires a lot of hardware.

Apple's work on generative AI is likely to be eventually incorporated into its Siri voice assistant. The company is rumored to be planning to add AI to as many Apple apps as possible, including Apple Music, Xcode, Pages, Keynote, and internal customer support apps. However, if Google’s AI initiatives are any indication, Apple's full generative AI vision will take time to fully scale, so the complete suite of AI features that Apple has planned might not arrive until 2025.

Apple has also approached major publishers like Condé Nast, NBC News, and IAC about possible AI deals, proposing multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license archives of news articles for AI training purposes. However, publishers are said to be "lukewarm" on Apple's offer due to the vagueness about how generative AI will be applied to news and the expansive terms Apple has been asking for.

Despite these developments, Apple analysts claim that there is "no sign" of generative AI technology coming in 2024, and that Apple's work on generative AI is "significantly behind its competitors".

Personally, I'd be very surprised if we don't see a significant release in 2024, but I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Sources:

[1] https://www.macrumors.com/guide/apple-gpt/

[2] https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/apple-thinks-its-ajax-gpt-is-more-powerful-than-chatgpt

[3] https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-to-use-chatgpt-as-a-siri-shortcut-on-your-iphone-or-ipad/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/22/technology/apple-ai-news-publishers.html

[5] https://ppl-ai-file-upload.s3.amazonaws.com/web/direct-files/1357227/0df4fea8-a9c4-44c0-923a-b3d77d597187/Apple Strategy.pdf

[6] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/apple-preps-ajax-generative-ai-apple-gpt-to-rival-openai-and-google