What did the leak reveal?
Namely, on July 19, Bloomberg released a report claiming that Apple is working on a large language model (LLM) called “Apple GPT”. The company still hasn’t found answers to questions such as how to release the tool so, for now, it’s been used solemnly as an internal chatbot.
This secret has been kept very privately, while Apple’s engineers were building their own framework with the ambition to outdo OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama.
However, only a few hours after the leak, Apple’s stock went down.
Source: Synthetic Mind
And while other companies, such as OpenAI, Meta and Microsoft, have been quick to develop and release their products to the public, Apple has been playing it differently, accepting the risk for others to take the lead.
Is Apple so sure of itself or does it have no clear strategy?
Apple has avoided the hype train so far, even as it adds more machine learning features to its devices all the time, but its 2018 hiring of former Google AI head John Giannandrea to head up the company’s machine learning efforts indicates it’s serious about wading into the uncertain waters of generative AI, even if it’s been mostly quiet about it.
Source: The Verge
What do we know about Apple GPT so far?
Without the official announcement from the company, we’re only left with guesses.
But some pieces of the puzzle are already coming together.
For example:
- Apple has banned the use of ChatGPT and has encouraged its employees to use the in-house alternative instead, mostly to summarize text, answer questions based on training data and prototype future features;
- Not only that, but Apple is considering other ways to use generative AI in-house, such as giving the tool to its AppleCare support team to help customers with technical issues;
- It’s going to run on an LLM called Ajax, running on Google Cloud and built with Google JAX, and it should be a close competitor to GPT-4;
- Ajax is already being tested in some Apple products, such as Apple TV;
- It will probably become either a combo with Siri or a AppleGPT iPhone assistant.
All in all, the company doesn’t have any solid plans to release the technology to the public yet.
Judging by the reactions of users, Apple rarely makes mistakes when it comes to such large announcements, but it is not unknown that they can sometimes be too ambitious in their ideas, so that they never experience wider application.
