Apple’s stock briefly surged on Wednesday, 19 July 2023 following a Bloomberg News report that stated the company was internally developing its own artificial intelligence large language model (LLM). However, it closed the trading day with a gain of less than 1%.
This move suggests that Apple is giving significant attention to recent advancements in AI technology and is contemplating their integration into forthcoming products. Notably, Apple typically prefers using the term « machine learning » over « artificial intelligence. »
Over the past year, there has been growing interest among technologists and investors in large language models, an AI technology capable of generating text or code that closely resembles human-produced content.
According to the Bloomberg News report, Apple has an internal foundation for AI known as Ajax, and a small team of engineers has developed a chatbot internally, often referred to as « Apple GPT. » Access to this chatbot is restricted within Apple. Some Apple employees believe that the company may make a significant AI-related announcement next year.
In addition to LLMs, Apple extensively employs machine learning in its products, ranging from Siri’s speech recognition capabilities to the Photos app’s ability to identify faces and pets.
To some extent, Apple appears to be relatively late in adopting the LLM trend. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its software, Google has incorporated its Bard into its search engine, Amazon plans to offer LLMs through AWS, and Meta recently open-sourced a substantial LLM project.
On Tuesday, Qualcomm, a company that manufactures processors for smartphones competing with Apple’s iPhone, announced its collaboration with Meta to enable LLMs to run directly on Android devices, rather than relying on distant cloud servers.
