Fever from artificial intelligence also hit Apple . Bloomberg anticipated Cupertino's plans, which would be working - quietly - on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools such as Chatbot style GPT Chat and various utilities, also integrated into proprietary operating systems, and which will only come out when the time is right. At the moment the news has not yet found confirmation from Apple. But upon its publication, Wednesday 19 July, the shares of the Cupertino company managed to gain up to 2,3% above the $198 level, only to then retreat. While Microsoft, the main supporter of OpenAI, suffered a 1% backlash.
Apple's silent strategy on artificial intelligence
Unlike all other Bigs who are trying their hand in this sector, Apple is working silently on the technology, even if it has long been integrating traditional AI features into its software. Among these the Crab, the voice assistant but which has been at a standstill for years now. Instead, the company has made AI advances in other areas, including improvements to iPhone photos and search. And coming to its mobile devices this year is a smarter version of the automatic correction. However, nothing had suggested that Cupertino was working on generative artificial intelligence systems.
This shouldn't come as a surprise though. Technology has captured the imagination of consumers and businesses in recent months, leading to a wave of new AI services. And therefore, the company with a capitalization of over 3 trillion must catch up if it wants to compete in the lively market of generative AI. What seems to be holding back the official announcement is that in Cupertino they have yet to understand or devise a clear strategy to propose and make the technology available to consumers, as confirmed by the recent statements by the CEO Tim Cook. According to the CEO, this technology, while it has potential, still carries with it "a number of problems that need to be solved", so Apple will integrate artificial intelligence into more than one of its products, he said on a conference call in May, but on "a very considered basis".
How will the Apple GPT work?
As the name suggests, what in the press it was christened as Apple GPT, the project should lead to the creation of a chatbot which will be inserted within the ecosystem of the bitten apple. But the technology behind it is completely different from the one behind OpenAI's GPT Chat. The unprecedented chatbox should take advantage of the LLM framework Proprietary Large Language Model (Large Language Model) called “Ajax” – created in 2022 and already used to make Siri more effective – running on Google Cloud and built leveraging Google JAX (a framework developed to accelerate machine learning research).
According to sources close to Cupertino, within the company there are more teams of engineers working on the project, even if as revealed by Bloomberg, the intention of the Californian company - at least for the moment - would not be to create a product based on 'AI aimed at consumers, but to face the privacy issues with employees using generative AI controlled by other companies.
In closing, Bloomberg reports that the Cupertino giant would be trying to make a announcement significant related to AI in 2024: that WWDC24 could be the right occasion for a new one "One more thing"?