Siri could be smarter

Only eight months have passed since OpenAI introduced ChatGPT to the world. Since then, major technology companies have not stopped looking for a way to join the generative AI bandwagon. Microsoft, Google, and now Meta have already presented their models and revealed strategies for launching this technology that creates all kinds of content. But there is some notable absence from the company, which tends to hide its secrets more jealously. What about Apple’s artificial intelligence?

The company, led by Tim Cook, has spent years developing products that take advantage of artificial intelligence. For example, in the computational imaging of the iPhone, or in features such as detecting accidents or falling mobile phones or the Apple Watch. The number of services and features on your devices that use AI is huge, but it all happens in the background, without user interaction. But in Cupertino they did not forget the generative language paradigms. In fact, they have the technology, though they don’t seem to have decided how to offer it to the general public.

The company is looking into its job offers for engineers who know big language paradigms

Bloomberg confirms that Apple has an AI chatbot comparable to ChatGPT, though it’s only for internal use. Apple’s AI system is called Ajax and they have a web app to have conversations with. This same information indicates that Apple wants to resolve the privacy issues of this technology before it is made available to the public.

It’s the opposite strategy to that applied by the rest of the big tech companies, which build their models and applications at a time when there is hardly any regulation in Europe and the US and maintain their product launch calendar, despite realizing that they will need to adapt to future regulations that are already being formulated. Apple is seriously committed to privacy as one of its hallmarks, so it can’t afford to rush into a field that has a lot to explore. Running too much with the AI ​​can cause you to stumble.

So far, Apple CEO Tim Cook has shown caution with this technology. “There are a number of problems that need to be resolved,” the manager said in May. In addition to privacy, AI models like OpenAI’s GPT-4 have some drawbacks, such as the possibility of inventing things or the fact that they are called “black box” systems, where even their creators don’t know how the AI ​​makes some decisions and not others.

Information from Bloomberg indicates that Apple has already been able to use artificial intelligence to allow it to make some improvements in products such as its virtual assistant Siri, maps and searches. Ajax is used to generate large language models that feed into the chat that is used internally now.

In job offers, the Cupertino company is seeking to hire engineers with a “strong knowledge of big language models and generative artificial intelligence” to work on the way people “communicate, create, connect and consume media” on the brand’s devices. Siri could get smarter.

The chips that opened an era

2017 was a very important year for Apple. In September, the iPhone X was presented, celebrating the tenth anniversary of the brand’s first mobile phone. In this phone, which includes facial recognition technology (FaceID) for the first time, its first chipset with neural networks has been used. It was called the A11 Bionic and it opened a new era in the company’s hardware for the use of artificial intelligence. It is applied in many functions of phones, although the most exciting one is in computational photography. Now, all brand chips, including those in computers, called Apple Silicon, have neural networks. The device is ready.

Read also