Apple was caught off guard when other AI products such as ChatGPT became popular, but the company is currently preparing countermeasures and plans to develop AI functions for its entire range of devices.
Tim Cook has previously claimed that Apple has been working on generative AI technology for years, but Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman made it clear that’s simply not the case in his latest Power On newsletter.
Last year, when OpenAI’s ChatGPT took off like a rocket, Apple basically did nothing. They’ve watched as Google and Microsoft launched search engines and other products based on generative AI, while Apple’s only focus on AI was the improved autocorrect system in iOS 17.
A person familiar with the matter said: “(Apple) is very anxious about this and internally believes that this is a quite big mistake.” Apple executives were caught off guard by the sudden burst of AI craze in the industry and have been working hard to make up for the loss since the end of last year. Opportunity.
As Gurman mentioned in July, the company has just created its own large-scale language model Ajax and launched a chatbot called “Apple GPT” within the company. The key next step is to determine whether the technology can cope with competitors, and how Apple will apply it to its products.
He also revealed that John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice presidents for AI and software engineering, are leading the effort and are on Cook’s team. Known as the “executive sponsor” driven by generative AI.
Apple services chief Eddie Cue is also said to be involved. The three now plan to invest approximately US$1 billion per year in this undertaking (currently approximately 7.32 billion yuan).
Currently, Giannandria is overseeing the development of the underlying technology for the new AI system, and his team is deeply revamping Siri to make it happen.
Gurman believes that this smarter Siri assistant won’t be ready until next year at the earliest, but there are still concerns within Apple about the technology, and it may take longer for Apple’s AI capabilities to become widespread across its product line.
Meanwhile, Federighi’s software engineering team is adding AI to iOS 18, and there’s a mandate to include features that run on the company’s Large Language Model (LLM), which leverages vast amounts of data to hone the AI. ability. The new features are said to further improve the ability of Siri and Messages apps to answer questions and self-complete sentences, similar to competing products.
Apple’s software engineering team is also considering integrating generative AI into development tools such as Xcode, a move that may help app developers write new apps faster. This is consistent with services such as Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, so Apple can currently It is said that it is completely lagging behind, even more than a year behind.
Additionally, Cue’s team is working to add AI to as many applications as possible. For example, the team is exploring adding new AI features to Apple Music, including automatic playlist generation (Spotify has already launched this feature in partnership with OpenAI), as well as the company’s productivity apps.
Cue’s team is said to be researching how to use generative AI to help users have a better experience in apps like Pages. Likewise, Microsoft has rolled out similar features for its Word and PowerPoint apps.
He also mentioned that Apple is also testing generative AI capabilities for internal customer service applications in its AppleCare division.
In addition, there is a very critical point in Apple’s internal debate about generative AI, that is, how to deploy generative AI, whether to run entirely locally on the device, or to adopt a cloud-based setup, or something in between. between.
As we all know, native support on the device is undoubtedly the fastest way and helps protect privacy, but cloud LLM enables more advanced operations.
Gurman believes Apple will likely take a hybrid approach, or a compromise where some functions are handled locally on the device while some more advanced tasks are handled in the cloud.
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