Apple has recently expanded its computing budget for building artificial intelligence (AI) to millions of dollars a day, according to The Information.
However, the article says the tech giant’s work on conversational AI began four years ago, long before the technology became a focus of the software industry. The Information says that one of Apple’s goals is to develop features such as one that allows iPhone customers to use simple voice commands to automate tasks involving multiple steps, according to people familiar with the effort.
The technology, for instance, could allow someone to tell the Siri voice assistant on their phone to create a GIF using the last five photos they’ve taken and text it to a friend. Today, an iPhone user has to manually program the individual actions.
The Information says these moves come four years after Apple’s head of AI, John Giannandrea, authorized the formation of a team to develop conversational AI, known as large-language models, before the technology became a focus of the software industry, according to people with knowledge of the team.
In March The New York Times reported that Apple is testing AI that could eventually come to Siri. Apple engineers, including members of the Siri team, have reportedly been testing language-generation concepts “every week” in response to the rise of chatbots like ChatGPT, the article adds. ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI and launched in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3 family of large language models and has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques
And there are issues with Siri.
Speaking to the New York Times, former Apple engineer John Burkey, who worked on Siri and was made responsible for improving it in 2014, explained that the voice assistant is built on “clunky code that took weeks to update with basic features.” He says its “cumbersome design” makes it very difficult for new features to be added.
This means that simple updates like adding new phrases to the data set requires rebuilding the entire Siri database. The could take up to six weeks, while adding more complicated features like new search tools could take up to a whole year. MacRumors notes that, as a result, there’s no path for Siri to become a “creative assistant” like ChatGPT.
And in July Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman reported that Apple is quietly working on artificial intelligence tools that could challenge those of OpenAI Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and others, but the company has yet to devise a clear strategy for releasing the technology to consumers, according to .
The company has built its own framework to create large language models — the AI-based systems at the heart of new offerings like ChatGPT and Google’s Bard — the article adds. With that foundation, known as “Ajax,” Apple also has created a chatbot service that some engineers call “Apple GPT,” according to Gurman.
From his report: The company has already deployed AI-related improvements to search, Siri and maps based on that system. And Ajax is now being used to create large language models and serve as the foundation for the internal ChatGPT-style tool, the people said.
The scale of testing within Apple seems especially concentrated for now, however, and Gurman reports that Apple is restrictive on how it can be used:
Still, the system requires special approval for access. There’s also a significant caveat: Any output from it can’t be used to develop features bound for customers. Even so, Apple employees are using it to assist with product prototyping. It also summarizes text and answers questions based on data it has been trained with.
