Apple is known for offering technologies and features already offered by other companies, but bringing them to market with a twist of innovation that makes them unique. And artificial intelligence is definitely one of those technologies. Nearly a year after other major players launched their artificial intelligence tools, Apple is reportedly spending millions of dollars per day developing its own AI.
Google and Microsoft, in contrast, jumped into the generative AI breach just weeks after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, each releasing their own AI chatbots, Bard and Bing.
Several months after these chatbots gained popularity and sparked controversy, The Information reports that Apple is also working on several artificial intelligence models. The tech giant sees generative AI as a growth area and an opportunity to compete with larger companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta, which also have models.
“Ajax GPT”, would be more powerful than GPT 3.5
Apple has several teams working on different AI models, including an image generation model, a multimodal model for processing text and visual data, and a conversational AI unit led by John Giannandrea, the vice president machine learning and AI strategy senior, who was originally hired to improve Siri.
The Information also reports that these models could automate tasks through Siri and serve as chatbots for AppleCare customer service.
Apple’s largest model, “Ajax GPT”, is said to be more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, which powers the free version of ChatGPT. Ajax GPT would have over 200 billion parameters, while GPT 3.5 would have around 175 billion.
Training large language models (LLMs) is expensive, which translates into high costs for hardware and data used in GPUs and TPUs, as well as massive storage of datasets. This also leads to high energy bills, as these systems consume a lot of energy. All of this, plus the time and expertise required to refine these machine learning models, adds up to an expensive endeavor, and Apple is paying the price – literally.
Apple’s significant investment in generative AI remains under wraps for now, with the company making no official announcements or confirmations of its progress.
Source: “ZDNet.com”