Taking a shine to ChatGPT, Apple begins testing generative AI concepts

Apple's Siri team is leading the project to develop generative AI concepts and is testing every week

Since the debut of OpenAI's ChatGPT in late November 2022 and its eventual integration with Microsoft's Bing search engine and other productivity tools, Google was given a rude awakening from its slumber. The latter has been at the forefront of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-integrated tools and products. But, its machine learning algorithm began to show biases of humans we often see such as sexism, racism, hate, and violence and this forced the company to go slow.

But, OpenAI was able to use Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017, to create ChatGPT, and now works better far better than anticipated.

Now, Google is on overdrive mode to bring not one but 20 similar generative AI chatbots to multiple use cases. Earlier this week, it announced integration with Workspace suite of apps including Gmail, Docs, Meet video conference app, and more.

So, what about the world's most valuable technology company Apple? What is it up to? Well, the Cupertino-based company is impressed with ChatGPT's capabilities and is chalking out plans to come up with its own.

Apparently, Apple held an internal A.I. Summit within the company HQ to brainstorm on language models and AI tools. And, the Siri team is now testing generative concepts every week, reported The New York Times, citing company insider.

Better late than never
Apple is long known to be obsessive with releasing products that are thoroughly tested before handing them to the public. Be it bringing an OLED display, FaceID to iPhones, or ongoing works on mixed reality headset, it always ensures the device is durable and offer a better user experience. This is why Apple has not yet introduced a foldable iPhone to the market.

But, Apple failed to make good use of Siri in its products. Though it was launched much earlier than Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, it lags in terms of responding better to the query.

There is a reason for it. Siri's code is too clunky to add new features, John Burkey, former Apple engineer said to NYT.

Apparently, Siri's database contains a big list of words and phrases, which it uses to respond to consumers' commands. And, to write in a new feature, the whole code has to be rewritten from scratch. Even to add a small phrase, it may take more than a month (close to six weeks) and for any new big changes, they may take up to a year, Burkey noted.

But, if Apple engineers try to come up with a better proprietary generative AI bot capable of churning out genuine information and integrating it to Siri with a new language model, it will surely take the user experience on Apple devices to a whole new level.

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