On Monday, Apple announced that it had made a deal with the maker OpenAI, known for their ChatGPT tool, and as well as their own AI software: Apple Intelligence. Their announcement will help them better compete with their rivals, Google and Microsoft, which have claimed that AI makes their products superior to Apple, The Washington Post reported.
Apple’s shift to the use of AI underscores the inescapability of this next big wave in technology.
Speaking at Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California, software chief Craig Federighi and AI chief John Giannandrea said Apple would take a different approach to the use of AI technologies compared to their competitors. They caution that their use of the technology will only be for the devices they sell and will focus on the personal data that AI can use.
“We think AI’s role is not to replace our users but to empower them,” Federighi said.
Giannandrea added that the company created a 3-billion parameter model as part of Apple Intelligence - this is quite small when compared to ChatGPT’s GPT-3 model from 2020 which is 175 billion parameters (which requires more memory and running power).
The company has paired with OpenAI so that their phones, computers and iPads will have ChatGPT built in later this year.
Apple’s approach to have a series of smaller models seems to be a way to slowly offer their users access to AI in a way that will not drain their battery power. For example, if Siri cannot provide a user an answer, then ChatGPT can offer that same assistance if a user allows it, a separate report revealed. This system is being packaged as “Apple Intelligence”.
But one challenge Apple faces is that of privacy. The company has used privacy as one of its primary selling points for years; advertising its ability to offer consumers access to their tech products without the infiltration of ad targeting, spammers and data brokers. However, most AI companies use peoples’ personal data to improve their software.
“We’re not going to take that data and go send it to some cloud somewhere,” Giannandrea said. “Because we want everything to be very private, whether it’s running locally or on a cloud computing service, and that’s the way we want it so we can use your most personal data.”
The company added that they may offer different models in the future, and seemed to stress what is essentially a test run before jumping into the world of AI. Federighi suggested more tailored systems like those for medical or legal purposes, or even the possibility of incorporating Google’s technology such as the Google Gemini, which Federighi said was the company’s direction.
“There are already some really impressive chat tools out there,” said Federighi. “But these tools know very little about you and your needs.”