Apple would spend millions of dollars a day on the development of AI

Apple is renowned for offering technologies and features already offered by other companies, but marketing them with a touch of innovation that makes them unique. And artificial intelligence is certainly one of these technologies. Almost a year after other major players launched their artificial intelligence tools, Apple is reportedly spending millions of dollars a day on the development of its own AI.

Google and Microsoft, on the contrary, rushed into the generative AI breach just a few weeks after the launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI, each publishing its own AI chatbot, Bard and Bing.

Several months after these chatbots gained popularity and caused controversy, The Information reports that Apple is also working on several artificial intelligence models. The tech giant sees generative AI as an area of growth and an opportunity to compete with large companies such as Amazon, Google and Meta, which also have models.

“Ajax GPT”, would be more powerful than GPT 3.5

Apple has several teams working on different AI models, including an image generation model, a multimodal model for processing text and visual data, and a conversational AI unit headed by John Giannandrea, the senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy, who was originally hired to improve Siri.

The Information also reports that these models could automate tasks via Siri and serve as chatbots for AppleCare customer service.

Apple’s largest model, “Ajax GPT”, is said to be more powerful than OpenAI’s GPT 3.5, which powers the free version of ChatGPT. Ajax GPT would have more than 200 billion parameters, while GPT 3.5 would have about 175 billion.

The formation of large-scale language models (LLMs) is expensive, which translates into high costs for the hardware and data used in GPUs and TPU, as well as for the massive storage of data sets. This also leads to high energy bills, as these systems consume a lot of energy. All of this, added to the time and expertise needed to refine these machine learning models, translates into an expensive undertaking, and Apple is paying the price – literally.

Apple’s considerable investment in generative AI remains secret for the moment, as the company has not made any official announcement or confirmation of its progress.

Source: “ZDNet.com “