A decade ago, Apple launched the Siri virtual assistant to modify the way the world interacts with digital technology. After Siri’s success, Amazon launched the similarly functioning Amazon Alexa in 2014. As the world began to see glimpses of the potential of generative artificial intelligence, tech giants Microsoft and Google created their own versions; Bing and Bard respectively. Apple, however, did not offer any system of generative AI up until now.
Recently, Apple’s US careers page has suggested this may be changing soon. When you search for “Generative AI” on the page, 48 open positions appear. They range from “Multimodal Generative Modeling Research Engineer”, “Visual Generative Modeling Research Engineer”, and “Machine Learning Engineer – Generative AI”. This could indicate that Apple is planning to create a system to rival the popular chatbot ChatGPT from OpenAI.
In March of this year, rumors had surfaced that Apple was actively research and working on generative AI technologies. Despite that, no official confirmation was made. Apple also recently prohibited their employees from using ChatGPT due to their concern of potential data breaches.
The need for generative AI had become increasingly evident in November of 2022 when OpenAI released their ChatGPT to the public. People were astounded by the AI’s ability to carry out conversations that seemed indistinguishable from human ones. Even with its initial shortcomings, Google’s AI chatbot, Bard, also created a stir during the recent Google I/O event when they made it available to the public. Microsoft joined the chatbot battle with its own AI powered Bing which helped users to browse the web, generate images and more.
This shows that Apple has finally realized the potential of generative AI due to its competitors taking great strides in the field. Whether the US-based tech giant will be launching a similar tool soon or not is still a question. However, their extensive efforts at hiring new staff for generative AI roles hint at Apple’s intent to offer their own version soon.
