Apple has built an AI bot to rival the likes of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Bard, Bloomberg reported on Wednesday. The bot, according to the report is built on Apple’s own large language model (LLM) framework called Ajax – which runs on Google Cloud and uses Google’s machine learning framework JAX. The bot built by Apple is being referred as Apple GPT by people inside the company. Apple does not have any plans to publicly launch the AI assistant as of now.
The company’s AI efforts are being led by its Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, John Giannandrea, who was previously at Google, and Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi. Despite ongoing efforts, Apple has been relatively quiet when it comes to generative AI apps. However, it is reportedly gearing up to make multiple announcements focused on AI next year. It is not immediately clear if these announcements would also include the public launch of the company’s AI bot.
Apple’s competition, including Microsoft and Google, has launched (or revealed) their generative AI apps and different products around them in the last six months. So, when Apple launches their AI assistant, they may have to play catch-up.
However, due to the kind of distribution they have, thanks to iPhone and iPad, the company should be able to onboard a very large number of users as soon as the AI app is launched. The biggest competitor would be ChatGPT, the AI assistant by OpenAI, which has grown its user base to over 100 million in just two months since its launch.
The employees at Apple are mainly using the chatbot for help with product prototyping. According to the report, it can be used to summarize text and answer questions based on its training data.
