Apple is reportedly developing its own generative AI chatbot to rival ChatGPT
It's called Ajax, though nobody knows how it'll be implemented.
Throughout the burgeoning “AI wars”, Apple has remained suspiciously silent, until now. The company is creating its very own chatbot, as originally reported by Bloomberg. Engineers have cheekily named the toolset “AppleGPT,” but it’s actually called Ajax, as the large language model (LLM) was built using Google’s JAX framework. Sources indicate that Apple has multiple teams working on the project, with one team devoted to addressing potential privacy concerns.
What will Apple actually do with the bot? That remains unclear as the company doesn’t seem to have any solid plans regarding use case scenarios, launch dates or platforms. An unnamed source told Bloomberg to expect an official announcement, along with more details, next year. Apple also holds its annual earnings call next month, which could shed some light on Ajax.
This move comes after Apple CEO Tim Cook told Good Morning America that the generative AI is something the company is “looking at closely.” According to Bloomberg, John Giannandrea and Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, Craig Federighi, are leading the initiative. Giannandrea was originally hired to oversee Siri and its machine learning capabilities, so maybe the beleaguered digital assistant is about to get a whole lot more useful.
The generative AI space has exploded in recent months, with just about every big tech company joining the hype train. Just yesterday, Meta and Microsoft released Llama 2, an AI chatbot intended for commercial use.
