Apple, the tech giant, is reportedly hiring for positions across its machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) team, which sets off talk of a potential rival to the popular chatbot from OpenAI, ChatGPT. AI chatbots such as Bing and Bard from Microsoft and Google, respectively, have created significant footprints in the field of generative AI.
Although Apple has yet to show any major developments in the AI field, the big tech company is heavily recruiting experts in the field of generative AI as seen on their US careers page; there are 48 search results when the term “Generative AI” is entered in. Potential positions range from Multimodal Generative Modelling Research Engineer to Visual Generative Modelling Research Engineer, and Machine Learning Engineer – Generative AI. Whether Apple is trying to start a project of its own or simply expand its current capabilities is not yet clear.
In March 2020, unconfirmed claims of Apple testing generative AI technology made headlines. However, this remains unconfirmed. Following such reports, Apple forbidden its employees from using the ChatGPT earlier this year due to concerns over data leakage.
ChatGPT, released in November 2020, has transformed the way people engage with AI technology. The chatbot has garnered immense attention for its uncanny human-like conversational prowess. This further sparked a surge of interest in the field of generative artificial intelligence.
Although there is no official word from Apple about developing its own ChatGPT-rival, the company’s persistent recruitment efforts point to the possibility of Apple developing a competing tool in the near future. The company’s ability to develop an efficacious AI product could further enlarge the scope of AI and its employability potential in multiple industries.