A recent report from Bloomberg revealed Apple’s internal response to generative AI technology.
The report quoted Apple CEO Tim Cook’s original words: “Apple has been working on generative AI technology for many years. But I can tell you clearly that Apple executives were caught off guard by the sudden artificial intelligence boom in the industry. We have been busy making up for lost time since the end of the year." Another person familiar with the matter said that Apple is very anxious about this and believes that this is a quite big mistake.
In July of this year, Apple built its own large-scale language model, called Ajax , and launched an internal chatbot called "Apple GPT" to test its capabilities. The key next step is to determine whether the technology can hold up against competitors and how Apple can actually implement it into products.
John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, senior vice presidents of artificial intelligence and software engineering respectively, are spearheading the effort, with services director Eddy Cue also involved. Currently, the trio plans to spend about $1 billion a year on the project.
According to reports, John Giannandrea is mainly responsible for the underlying technology of the new AI system. His team is currently improving Siri. This smarter Siri may be ready as early as next year. But the technology still raises concerns, and it may take longer for Apple's AI capabilities to become widespread across its product line.
Meanwhile, Craig Federighi's software engineering team is adding AI to the next version of iOS, as well as integrating generative AI technology into development tools like Xcode — similar to services like Microsoft's GitHub Copilot. The move could help app developers write apps faster, helping them provide auto-completion suggestions as they write code.
The report also mentioned that an ongoing debate within Apple is how to deploy generative AI : running entirely on the device , running in the cloud or somewhere in between .
Deploying on-device will run faster and help protect privacy, but deploying large models via the cloud will allow for more advanced operations. A strategy deployed on the device side would also make it harder for Apple to update its technology and adapt to a rapidly changing industry. With that in mind, the company is likely to take a combined approach: using on-device deployments for certain functions and the cloud for more advanced tasks.
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