Athough it does not seems, Apple is investing millions of dollars a day in the development of AI models able to compete against ChatGPT. So it affirms The Information, who ensures that the Cupertino company is working on different artificial intelligence products through various teams. And one of them, it could be more powerful than the popular OpenAI chatbot.
According to the aforementioned medium, the company currently has a department dedicated to generative AI called “Fundamental Models”. In it, they work “around” about 16 peoplesome of them former Google engineers, and the team is led by John Giannandrea, Apple’s chief artificial intelligence officer who joined the company in 2018 with the goal of improving Siri.
This would be the team in charge of developing and training what they internally call Ajax GPT, a language model or chatbot similar to ChatGPT that, according to The Information, has been trained on “more than 200 billion parameters” and it is considerably more advanced than GPT-3.5. At the moment, yes, this chatbot is only used internally, and only a few employees can access it.
In any case, the so-called Ajax GPT is not the only AI model that Apple is working on. The company also has smaller teams focused on other AI products. Among them, one “Multimodal AI, which can recognize and produce images or videos, as well as text”. That is, something similar to what we can do with DALL-E.
Apple, yes could use its powerful AI model to improve some of its services. For example, the company appears to be working on a chatbot that would only “interact with customers using AppleCare”; probably, to offer technical support or solve doubts. Apple is also working on an AI model that allows the automation of tasks through Siri.
Apple has spent years investing in AI
Curiously, Tim Cook himself revealed a few weeks ago that Apple has been investing in artificial intelligence for years. He also stressed that they will continue to do so “responsibly” in their products to “help enrich people’s lives.”
In fact, and although it may not seem like it, since Apple has never mentioned AI in its products and services, many of the functions available on the iPhone, iPad, Mac or other company devices, They work thanks to artificial intelligence. One of them is the accident detection available on the iPhone 14, which is capable of detecting if the user has had a collision with their vehicle and automatically calling emergencies. Also the different automation features of the iPhone, such as the one that suggests applications based on location.
At the moment, yes, it is unknown when we could see an AI model similar to that of ChatGPT, as well as important improvements in Siri, the company’s virtual assistant.