In July Mark Gurman reported for Bloomberg News that Apple has an onging internal generative AI project: “Apple employees say the company’s tool essentially replicates Bard, ChatGPT and Bing AI, and doesn’t include any novel features or technology. The system is accessible as a web application and has a stripped-down design not meant for public consumption. As such, Apple has no current plans to release it to consumers, though it is actively working to improve its underlying models.”
So, will Apple eventually create its own ChatGPT competitor? As one who has covered Apple since 1981 and has studied how they think about new products, I believe they will not create a competitor to ChatGPT. Of course, it would be foolish to predict that they would never do this, but I have three reasons why Apple most likely will not enter the ChatGPT wars.
The first is Apple’s extremely cautious approach to creating any product. Apple really understands the potential of AI, and if they are to use AI, they want to use it in the most responsible way possible. That is why using AI in their technology engines makes more sense to them.
The second reason is that ChatGPT and other programs like them have no guardrails and most likely will never be able to put the genie back in the bottle with these programs. Many companies making generative AI public solutions are already being sued left and right for everything from copyright infringements to content companies suing them to stop scraping their data to train their large language models. Apple does not want these headaches, and who would blame them?
The third reason relates to their commitment to the privacy of their customers.
MacDailyNews Take: “Apple’s cautious approach to AI should be celebrated,” Bajarin writes. We agree.
Given some of the craziness, bias, falsehoods, and just plain mistakes we see in ChatGPT and Bard, it makes sense for Apple to proceed conservatively. – MacDailyNews, August 2, 2023
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Apple has had a Chat-GPT competitor for a decade: Siri. It’s just that Apple has not been successful at (or even tried?) incorporating sufficiently large language models and/or generative capabilities into its ever-dumb assistant.
Totally agree. Siri, for the most part, has been useless to me. There are times when it can’t recognize my voice despite the fact that I’ve been using it extensively. I’ve had to call “Hey, Siri” so many times that I just get angry at it. It’s dumb at this point.
It’s funny. I hear your story often, but I find myself using Siri at least once a day, usually several times a day. I use her to send texts when driving (is that illegal since I’m not looking at my phone?), respond to texts on my watch, play music, start a timer, set an alarm, ask for navigation, etc. I rarely ask her the meaning of life, but I do ask her to convert amounts from one system to another. I rarely have to repeat myself.
I wonder why it is different for me than it is for others?
SIRI SUCKS!
Try Alexa.
Nuff said…
I use Siri every day for all sorts of things; simple arithmetic, weather in various cities around the world, time in other cities, stock prices, sports trivia and more.
Siri is not backed by an LLM. At least not yet…
Good. Let MSFT and OpenAI answer these questions about their nonsense product in court – assuming they ever make a profit off it.
Apple has morals here, they don’t.
Agree with MDN. These AIs are already getting politicized. Apple needs to improve siri massively (likely not happening given Cue’s hx with services..), but full fledged ‘AI’ should be an optional plug-in to Siri, where you can pick which one fits you (like search is in Safari).