Apple GPT was initially rolled out internally but its launch faced a temporary halt due to security concerns.
American multinational tech giant Apple has reportedly been quietly working on developing its own artificial intelligence-powered chatbot, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard. Dubbed “Apple GPT,” the chatbot forms a part of Apple’s effort to build large language models through their proprietary framework called “Ajax,” according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.
The iPhone maker’s head of machine learning and AI John Giannandrea and Apple’s top software engineering executive Craig Federighi, along with several others, have led the development of “Apple GPT” and the underlying Ajax framework. The Ajax framework, which powers the “Apple GPT” chatbot, is built on top of Google JAX. Google JAX is a machine learning framework developed by Google and has been employed in various areas such as large language models, drug discovery, physics machine learning, reinforcement learning, and neural graphics. Ajax itself operates on Google Cloud, indicating Apple’s collaboration with the search giant in its AI initiatives.
Additionally, the AI chatbot developed by Apple was initially rolled out internally. However, due to security concerns surrounding generative AI, Apple GPT’s launch faced a temporary halt but its access has been gradually extended to more Apple employees on special approval.
While other tech giants like Meta, Microsoft, and Google have rapidly released generative AI products to both businesses and the general public, Apple has taken a more cautious approach in this domain. The company has been somewhat silent in the generative AI space, but it has been incorporating AI features into its software, most notably through Siri, its widely recognized voice assistant.
There is no official confirmation by Apple about the development of a chatbot and other details like its launch date, etc. are still unclear at the moment. However, with Apple GPT, the Tim Cook-led tech company follows the suit of other tech majors like Google and Baidu who are investing heavily in the AI segment to emulate the success of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT that was launched in November last year. Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is a popular AI text generator and has been a center of attention for many due to its human-like response.
