Apple joins the AI craze, likely to begin with a ChatGPT/Bard competitor. Internally dubbed Apple GPT.
Apple has finally revealed what it aims to do in the AI popular culture. It has developed its own framework called “Ajax,” a chatbot that’s being called “Apple GPT” internally. It’s scheduled to be available publicly for consumers next year.
The machine learning framework behind Apple’s upcoming AI tools is Google’s Jax. It runs on Google Cloud.
The news was reported first in Bloomberg (link—paywalled) where it clarifies how the new tools will aim at challenging OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. The report also notes that there isn’t a clear strategy to release the technology to consumers.
So far, the company has only worked on a large language model that will power the chatbot, and possibly other AI tools such as an AI-equipped Siri on the iPhones.
According to the employees, work on Ajax started as an experiment in late 2022 and witnessed some internal security concerns that disabled employees from using it for consumer-facing applications. Employees have to go through an approval process just to use a stripped-down version of the framework for their internal use, such as product prototyping.
Reportedly, Apple executives John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi are leading teams working on Ajax’s public rollout by fashioning the model into AI tools for public use. They have the intent to announce something in 2024.
In related news, Chloe Taylor on Fortune writes how (link—paywalled) this Apple GPT news added $71 billion to the company’s market value.
Apple’s focus on isolating running instances of any AI application within the hardware might be privacy-focused, but can ultimately hamper performance. Additionally, the report also highlights how Apple has a shortage of AI talent compared to Google and Microsoft (and now, Elon Musk’s xAI).
Recently, Apple also unveiled the improvements coming in the next iOS version—iOS 17. In the host of planned features and improvements to be rolled out as part of the package, some Siri-specific features are likely built on AI of some kind. Read Tom’s Guide’s article on iOS 17.
