Apple Rumored To Be Developing An AI To Rival ChatGPT
2023 is turning out to be a high-growth year for artificial intelligence (AI) and related technologies. Tech giants — including the likes of Microsoft and Google — have invested heavily in the segment, and already have AI-based tools either in operation or in advanced stages of deployment. Interestingly Apple, the company generally associated with groundbreaking hardware and software advancements, has been uncharacteristically silent in this space.
Apple has yet to make public comments about its AI plans, but a report by The New York Times indicates that the rising popularity of ChatGPT and generative AI has coerced Apple into taking the segment seriously. While a ChatGPT-like tool for Apple could be a couple of years away, the company may just have begun the process to create an artificial intelligence chatbot of its own.
The NYT report claims that Apple recently conducted an internal event focused on generative AI content and large language models (LLM), which are the neural networks that power chatbots like ChatGPT. The event was open to employees working on Apple's voice-powered assistant Siri, which has remained unchanged for over a decade. Unfortunately, the report doesn't say anything about the outcome of the event or if the company has set the ball rolling for creating a ChatGPT-rival of its own.
However, given that Microsoft and Google are making their presence felt in the AI space, Apple will likely toss its own hat in the ring.
Will generative AI replace voice assistants?
Voice assistant tools like Google Assistant and Apple's Siri could not gain as much popularity as Apple and Google seemingly hoped. Besides issues with accuracy, these tools have hardly shown generational improvement in capabilities despite being around for over a decade. This is in complete contrast to ChatGPT, which has showcased amazing capabilities since day one. It only took Open AI a couple of months to improve its AI tool with the release of a new language model — GPT-4.
While hardly any entity other than Google, Microsoft (remember Cortana?), and Apple has worked on voice assistants, the chatbot space could see attempts from new, smaller upstarts like Anthropic — which also released its own chatbot called Claude a few days ago. It will also be interesting to see what Google achieves with Bard when it is ready for primetime later this year.
Given that Apple has implemented several AI-powered features in the past, it is ironic seeing the company fall behind its peers in the generative AI space. While it remains to be seen how long Apple takes to create a ChatGPT rival of its own, Apple needs to act fast.