Apple is said to have significantly increased its investment in artificial intelligence (AI) over the past few months to focus on conversational AI, automation, and multimodal systems.
According to Neowin, in July, it was reported that Apple is working on a large language model (LLM) that has the potential to power an AI chatbot tool that company employees call “Apple GPT “. Now, a new report shows that Apple is now spending millions of dollars every day on LLM training in the Foundational Models team that it established four years ago and is led by Siri Director John Giannandrea.
Despite Giannandrea’s skepticism towards AI chatbots, Apple is still testing its own internal bots called Ajax GPT. Sources claim that Ajax GPT offers more advanced power than OpenAI ‘s ChatGPT 3.5.
While competitors like Microsoft’s Bing or Google’s Bard have emerged, Apple has yet to reveal any consumer-facing conversational AI products. Even the Foundational Models team of 16 people is very small compared to the resources that Apple’s competitors possess.
However, Apple seems to have big AI ambitions with a broader scope beyond chatbots. One project aims to develop a Siri feature that can automate multi-step tasks given by users, eliminating the need for Shortcuts workflows on iOS. According to sources, this feature could appear as early as iOS 18.
Apple is determined not to fall behind as the AI race heats up in Silicon Valley. However, analyst Ming-chi Kuo said last month that Apple’s progress in AI is “significantly behind that of its competitors”. For example, Microsoft has invested heavily in this area, including integrating AI into its various products such as Bing Chat AI and the upcoming Copilot feature on Microsoft 365 and Windows 11, among many others.