The information confirms and complements what Mark Gurman published in July and informs us about Apple’s plans for conversational AI. We learn that the company has begun developing such AI… and that investments are now being increased to support this development internally.
Apple Siri could benefit from Apple’s investments in conversational AI in the medium term // Source: Apple
A small team with ever-larger budgets… This is the often well-informed media outlet The Information’s overview of the team of 16 engineers who hired Apple to develop conversational AI. In particular, we learn that the company “spends millions of dollars every day to train its language models,” reports MacRumors, which reminds us (to give an order of magnitude) that OpenAI invested more than $100 million in the development of ChatGPT- 4 invested. A budget required, among other things, for the purchase of hardware (particularly GPU) to train AI models.
This information comes to us a few weeks after Mark Gurman revealed that Apple was actually working on developing a type of “Apple GPT”. The Bloomberg journalist then specified that this initiative was launched despite the skepticism of John Giannandrea, head of AI at Apple. We also discovered that certain employees within the group already have access to an experimental chatbot nicknamed “Ajax.”
New in 2024 with iOS 18?
For mere mortals, Apple’s work in conversational AI would bear fruit starting with iOS 18 and thus in 2024. According to The Information, the idea initially is to improve the experience offered by Siri, especially when managing multi-step tasks. Note that these multi-step tasks can already be managed by the iPhone, but only if they are previously configured manually using the Shortcuts application. In other words, Apple intends to simplify our lives by allowing Siri to do this even through a simple voice request.
At the same time, Apple also commissioned employees to develop tools that can be used to create videos and images. These engineers would also be responsible for a multimodal AI that can use images or videos in addition to text. Currently, the “Ajax” AI that Apple works with internally is said to perform better than ChatGPT 3.5, MacRumors reports. The latter would also have been trained using 200 billion parameters. However, the latest AI models provided by OpenIA would be even more efficient for now.
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