I imagine Tim Cook in his office in December 2022. “I’ll try what I saw on Xataka from ChatGPT.” And then, increasingly stunned and angry, they realized something: they were lost. How was that possible?
Apple is moving away from AI. In recent months, the market didn’t seem particularly interested in Apple, which barely talked (or didn’t talk) about AI. It’s like he completely passed on this promising technology, and that doesn’t seem so bad, because Apple usually comes late, but it does it with products (iPod, iPhone) that surpass those of its competitors. However, he didn’t say those words once at his last WWDC conference, and while we think we know the possible reasons, another big reason is simply that they had nothing to talk about.
We are lost. As Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman points out, Tim Cook may be publicly saying that Apple has been working on generative AI for years. However, their sources indicate that the company was caught off guard by the development and that “there’s a lot of concern about it and internally it’s seen as a pretty big failure.”
Ajax. This is the name of the large language model (LLM) that the company developed after it started working in this area. It is the one that internally uses their own chatbot, nicknamed “Apple GPT”, and now they are evaluating whether this development can compete with their competitors and how to deploy it in their products.
The solution is to spend money. John Giannandrea and Graig Federighi are responsible for these new efforts, although Eddy Cue, head of services, is also involved, according to Bloomberg. In order not to lose this race, Apple invests almost 1 billion a year.
Nothing particularly new. Those in charge of Apple seem to be lagging behind the rollout we’ve seen from other tech giants. So the Cupertino teams would work on Siri with integrated generative AI (like ChatGPT with voice), automatic sentence completion, integration of generative AI also in XCode (as in GitHub Copilot, among others) or improving Apple Music to create playlists more in line with the user’s taste (like the one Spotify introduced in February). The important thing, at least for now, seems to be able to compete with its main rivals with similar products but adapted to their ecosystem.
In the cloud or locally? At Apple, one of the big debates about how to deploy these services is whether they will depend on the cloud – like ChatGPT or Midjourney – or whether they can be used locally on the device, even when we’re offline. This last option is often used by Apple and offers more guarantees when it comes to privacy, but now the cloud allows access to more advanced options.
Image | ACC District | OpenAI
In Xataka | According to the WSJ, Apple is restricting the use of ChatGPT among its employees. It makes sense to know Apple