Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year, Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly evolved into what seems to…
Since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year, Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly evolved into what seems to be a commonly used word to denote a more sophisticated intrusion into the use of technology.
Although artificial intelligence (AI) has long played a role in mankind’s quest for a more advanced way of living, largely due to the solutions offered by tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Google, and even Meta, it has recently sparked greater attention and worry.
The fuss has not only gone beyond casual chats, it has also been impactful enough to convince large tech companies and multinationals to invest more in its research and incorporate its mechanics into their operations and consumer-focused products.
Google, Microsoft, and even Meta are just a few of the large IT companies that have fully embraced this initiative. These large corporations are jostling among each other about who provides the best user experiences and technological solutions to the real-life problems of their users. They also aim to make the solution they provide even more artificial by incorporating a more intelligent machine or algorithm, all in a bid to outdo the other.
This jostling among these rival big tech companies is to be expected. With generative AI seeming to be the new oil of the tech industry, these big technology companies are now rushing to work similar capabilities into their own products. But with all the fuss around generative AI by Google, Meta and even Microsoft, why is Apple seemingly silent?
Generative AI announcements from major tech companies continue to roll in; meanwhile, Apple’s silence on the subject grows louder.
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Google, Microsoft and the major pushers
Microsoft and Google released competing AI-powered products recently, amid a slew of other companies who have begun announcing plans for products and services running on some type of AI. This new race —driven by the hype surrounding OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT application— has turned AI into the new battleground.
Apple recently announced the rolling out of some AI-assisted features to some of its productivity apps. This announcement came after the release of Open AI’s GPT-4 of which Microsoft, its rival, is a major investor. This also came a few days before Microsoft’s online event focused on AI and productivity software.
This is coupled with the introduction of Bard, an experimental conversational AI service powered by LaMDA. Bard according to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO is “meant to be a conversational AI service that combines the depth of the world’s information with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s large language models to help deliver answers to inquiries. It uses online information to give new, high-quality responses.”
Google’s Bard was developed as a type of competition for ChatGPT and Microsoft, which is now a significant investor in the ongoing research and development of AI. Microsoft’s investment into OpenAI’s burgeoning adventure has seen it include ChatGPT in its office suite, which includes Word, Outlook, and PowerPoint, to increase users’ effectiveness and productivity.
Also, that investment has pushed Microsoft’s latest reinventing and integration of an AI-powered service into its Bing and Edge browsers to provide better search results, solutions, a new chat experience, etc.
But the continuing and seemingly escalating AI war does not stop with Google and Microsoft. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, has been another major proponent and pusher of AI. Before the ChatGPT launch, the company announced the introduction of a single AI model capable of translating over 200 languages, including 55 African languages. The open-source model, named ‘No Language Left Behind’ NLLB-200, is the first of its type.
Recently, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO and founder, announced that Meta is building “a new top-level product group” to consolidate generative Artificial Intelligence into its services, including Instagram and WhatsApp. This evolution commences by testing text-based AI tools on WhatsApp, Messenger or ChatGPT-styled conversation bots.
More recently, Meta reported a profit of $5.7bn (£4.6bn) for the first quarter of this year, surpassing expectations for a period in which many jobs were cut at the big tech company. The company accorded this to AI, which has been the “major driver of the good results recently”, after coming from dwindling circles.
In all of this, notable by its absence in the current conversation, however, is Apple. While all of its peers, including Amazon, seem to be rushing to get into the so-called generative AI craze, Apple hasn’t said anything one way or the other about the space.
Analyzing Apple’s seeming silence
Contrary to belief, Apple is actually heavily invested in AI and has been for many years. However, Apple’s approach to AI is somewhat different from that of other tech companies. Instead of using AI primarily for cloud-based services like Amazon and Microsoft, Apple focuses on integrating AI into its hardware and software products.
Apple has stayed out of the generative AI discussion so far, mainly because the technology is not seen as directly disruptive to its core businesses (hardware)—at least not in the way that generative AI could be disruptive to Google’s core Search business, or to Microsoft’s core productivity apps business.
For example, Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri, uses AI to understand and respond to natural language commands. Apple also uses AI in its camera software to improve image processing and facial recognition capabilities. Additionally, Apple has developed its own AI-specific hardware, such as the Neural Engine in its A-series chips, to optimize AI performance on its devices.
Apple is known as a “fast follower”; it likes to wait until new technologies have matured, then jump in with its own Apple-flavored version. So far, the company has treated AI as an enabling technology that it deploys behind the scenes to make its devices and apps work better.
Even Apple’s CEO Tim Cook himself has said that AI “will affect every product and service we have.” This is a valid pointer that the company has something already up its sleeves.
At Apple’s annual AI summit a few months ago, employees were reportedly given information about the company’s large language model and other AI tools. In response to the growing popularity of chatbots like ChatGPT, Apple engineers, including those from the Siri team, have supposedly been experimenting with language-generation ideas every week.
AI for several years now, but DA Davidson analyst Tom Forte predicts that it’s not the company’s style to launch a big, splashy AI product of its own. Instead, he says, it’s more likely to be used in the background.
“As one of the biggest companies in the world, Apple is doing something around AI, but it will not be as buzzy as ChatGPT. When Apple uses AI, they do so more to enhance their technology,” said Forte.
One reason why Apple may not appear to be as heavily invested in AI as other companies is that it prioritizes user privacy. Apple has implemented strict data privacy policies and uses on-device processing for many AI applications, rather than sending user data to the cloud for analysis. This approach can limit the amount of data that Apple has access to for training and improving its AI models.