Apple thinks its 'Ajax GPT' is more powerful than ChatGPT – Interesting Engineering
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Apple is spending millions of dollars a day to build artificial intelligence tools, according to The Information, which spoke to people familiar with the matter.
Although Apple considers itself to be its closest competitor, given how it chose to launch Vision Pro when the clamor around AR/VR tech had died down, the scale of investments by Apple is telling of how the tech industry’s pivot to generative AI has affected the company’s outlook, especially with OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT taking center stage.
But Apple has been experimenting with AI long before the stream of chatbots arrived on the scene. Apple’s AI head, John Giannandrea, four years ago formed a team to develop conversational AI, much like ChatGPT. One of the teams working at Apple has around 16 teammates, including several former Google engineers, and is helmed by Giannandrea.
The company has been using AI in other areas, like Apple Watches, which have Fall Detection and Crash Detection and monitor the wearer's heartbeat. And, of course, Apple has its AI voice assistant – Siri, which, according to The Information’s report, will see a makeover.
The goal is for iPhone users to give commands to Siri to automate tasks involving multiple steps. “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,” says the report.
The teams at Apple are working across several models and on tools to create video, images, and text responses to queries. Another team is working on a chatbot that would “interact with customers who use AppleCare,” said The Information report.
Interesting Engineering had reported in July that the Tim Cook-led company is creating a large language model (LLM) dubbed ‘Ajax,’ which would directly compete with OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4, Google’s Bert and LaMDA, Meta’s LLaMa-1 and LLaMa-2.
Apple already has a chatbot that the company insiders call ‘Apple GPT,’ which runs on Ajax and is used in-house by Apple employees for product prototyping. Ajax has reportedly been trained on over 200 billion parameters and is claimed to be more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.
While all this information has been pieced together by reporters who have spoken to people inside the company, it remains to be seen if Apple will announce any generative AI tools, models, or services on September 12, when it will unveil the iPhone 15.
It’s highly unlikely that it does. Apple usually saves its major development announcements for the World Wide Developer’s Conference in June every year.
