Apple has significantly ramped up its spending on artificial intelligence, according to a new report from The Information that highlights Apple's AI and machine learning research.
Though Apple's AI chief John Giannandrea is said to be skeptical of AI chatbots, he established a team that is working on conversational AI four years ago. We have heard prior rumors about "Apple GPT" from Bloomberg's Mark Gurman. Gurman in July said that Apple was experimenting with large language models, and some Apple employees have access to an "Ajax" internal chatbot.
With the 2022 debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT, chatbots suddenly became the must-have feature. Microsoft and Google have both launched chatbots, but there are so far no signs that Apple has a consumer-oriented product launching in the near future.
Apple's "Foundational Models" team that works on conversational AI includes just 16 people, but Apple is spending millions of dollars per day training its language models. Training large language models requires a lot of hardware, and as an example, OpenAI Sam Altman said the company spent more than $100 million for GPT-4.
According to The Information, Apple has other AI goals. The company is aiming to develop a feature that would allow a voice assistant like Siri to automate multi-step tasks. That functionality is available on the iPhone today, but workflows must be manually set up using the Shortcuts app.
The Siri team could have multi-step voice-controlled automation ready for use in iOS 18.
Apple also appears to have AI teams that are working on software to generate videos and images and multimodal AI that works with images, video, and text. The aforementioned Ajax chatbot that Apple is working with is supposedly more capable than the original ChatGPT 3.5 and has been trained on 200 billion parameters, but OpenAI's newer models are more powerful.
Considering how Google and Amazon are decreasing work on their voice assistants due to them not making enough money, I think Apple actually has a shot at taking the first place trophy next year for voice assistant for the first time since they were the only option… That would be a wild shake up in the state of affairs.
Wednesday April 24, 2024 2:05 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
Apple is set to unveil iOS 18 during its WWDC keynote on June 10, so the software update is a little over six weeks away from being announced. Below, we recap rumored features and changes planned for the iPhone with iOS 18. iOS 18 will reportedly be the "biggest" update in the iPhone's history, with new ChatGPT-inspired generative AI features, a more customizable Home Screen, and much more....
Wednesday April 24, 2024 3:39 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple today released several open source large language models (LLMs) that are designed to run on-device rather than through cloud servers. Called OpenELM (Open-source Efficient Language Models), the LLMs are available on the Hugging Face Hub, a community for sharing AI code. As outlined in a white paper [PDF], there are eight total OpenELM models, four of which were pre-trained using the...
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Best Buy is discounting a collection of M3 MacBook Pro computers today, this time focusing on the 14-inch version of the laptop. Every deal in this sale requires you to have a My Best Buy Plus or Total membership, although non-members can still get solid second-best prices on these MacBook Pro models. Note: MacRumors is an affiliate partner with Best Buy. When you click a link and make a...
Saturday April 27, 2024 12:41 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
There are widespread reports of Apple users being locked out of their Apple ID overnight for no apparent reason, requiring a password reset before they can log in again. Users say the sudden inexplicable Apple ID sign-out is occurring across multiple devices. When they attempt to sign in again they are locked out of their account and asked to reset their password in order to regain access. ...
Apple used to regularly increase the base memory of its Macs up until 2011, the same year Tim Cook was appointed CEO, charts posted on Mastodon by David Schaub show. Earlier this year, Schaub generated two charts: One showing the base memory capacities of Apple's all-in-one Macs from 1984 onwards, and a second depicting Apple's consumer laptop base RAM from 1999 onwards. Both charts were...
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