Apple Reignites Talks With OpenAI About Generative AI for iOS 18

I don't know much about these things, but if this all supposed to be released later this year, doesn't it seem a bit late to still be choosing their AI partner(s)? It's nearly May.

This is bad news..
- With Apple’s stance on privacy, on a new venture like LLM, they should develop their own model.
- Apple has spent 10 years on quote “master of all AI” - the apple car, and they cannot even develop a good foundation model?
- GPT3 was out how many years ago? The fact that they are still discussing with any company on licensing LLM means the whole leadership lacked foresight on the future of AI. And you cannot expect the same leadership to pull out something amazing. That’s not how it works
- You really need to focus on the use case before selecting a direction. If Apple’s thought are still a chatbot and Q&A machine - gpt - as their ultimate LLM (that runs on the cloud). It means Apple is not leveraging the benefit of their ecosystem: the vast number of Apps and streamlined APIs, partnership with mfi programs, the user data they can use as inputs to the llm for actual personalized assistants, etc.

This just doesn’t look good at all

I don't know much about these things, but if this all supposed to be released later this year, doesn't it seem a bit late to still be choosing their AI partner(s)? It's nearly May.

We built a very robust AI service using the OpenAI LLM via their API. It took less than two weeks working part time and is extremely good. Apple has orders of magnitude more engineers than we do — it's not *that* hard for good engineers. They're probably negotiating costs, token volume, SLAs, etc. They may even have deeply technical and mature POCs already and just discussing scale, etc.

OpenAI today is what Apple was when Jobs came back in 1997. Apple today is a bloated corporate blimp with no direction. They missed the AI boat and will never catch up. God, I hope I’m wrong.

You are very wrong. You've been using AI (the subset called ML - machine learning) for decades with Apple tech.

This new era is a separate field called "generative" AI and it's only just beginning.

* Did Apple miss the boat on personal computing? This existing before the Mac.
* Did Apple miss the boat on MP3 players? They existed long before the iPod.
* Did Apple miss the boat on "smart" cellphones? They existed long before iPhone.

There's no missing the boat when it comes to Apple. The boat just doesn't always set sail when we want it to.

Pathetic effort by Apple. 3 TB company can’t build their own LLM? Instead Tim Cook all in on the failed Vision Pro. What a mess.

3 TB isn’t really a lot to train an LLM.

I think his point is that Apple should be able to build anything they need of this sort, on device or cloud, or space, or another dimension. Instead, because of Apple's lack of foresight, slow reaction, and poor decisions, we are getting Gemini and Baidu or some other data miner.

ChatGPT stormed onto the scene on Nov 30, 2022, but was in development for 6 years before that. Apple has been working with ML (machine learning) technology for far longer. They are not suddenly trying to catch up with "AI" in general.

It's just this new "generative AI" that suddenly overtook the world that is giving the impression that Apple is somehow "behind" on the times.

It continues to puzzle me why people think that Apple even needs to be part of the generative AI craze. You want ChatGPT, Baidu or Gemini? They all run beautifully on your iPhone and your Mac. Apple already made the sale of hardware upon which engineers built these tools and consumers consume them. Having Apple offer up their own is just adding another burger to the plate, not a new plate.

EDIT: Re-reading the above comment ... maybe the drive is that Apple will do generative AI with privacy and responsible data sourcing as part of their effort, compared to these others?