Since OpenAI’s November 2022 public launch of ChatGPT, generative AI has become the new hot thing in the tech world, albeit with a lot of potential ethical complications. There are concerns about such AI stealing from the data it was trained on, as well as AI being used to substitute actual human workers. Apple hasn’t released any generative AI products as of yet, but in interviews and on investor calls, Tim Cook has made it clear that the company has been working on such tech for a while. He’s specified, though, that he wants to make sure that Apple’s generative AI tech is used responsibly.
“In terms of generative AI, obviously, we have work going on,” Cook explained on Apple’s November 2023 investor call. “I’m not going to get into details about what it is because, as you know, we really don’t do that. But you can bet that we’re investing. We’re investing quite a bit. We’re going to do it responsibly, and it will… you will see product advancements over time where those technologies are at the heart of them.”
Bloomberg had previously reported in July 2023 that Apple was working on a language model, “Ajax,” with an associated chatbot nicknamed “Apple GPT.” In October 2023, one source dubbed “a person with knowledge of the matter” told Bloomberg that “[t]here’s a lot of anxiety about this, and it’s considered a pretty big miss internally.” The same article said that head of services Eddie Cue was running a team that was looking into how generative AI could be used to assist writers in Pages and Keynote.
Something is coming; the question is what it could be that could contend with rival models while also being more “responsible” than them.
