Apple Tests ‘Apple GPT,’ Develops Generative AI Tools to Catch OpenAI

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/apple-preps-ajax-generative-ai-apple-gpt-to-rival-openai-and-google

105 106 3 years ago

smoldesu2• 3 years ago

cptcobalt• 3 years ago

I hope Apple gives us both a web API (that can be used on any platform at a low-ish cost, similar to OpenAI) and a smaller, private model that's optimally sized to run on Mac, iPad, and Phone hardware.

TillE• 3 years ago

Does Apple do general-purpose web APIs? The only one I can think of is WeatherKit.

Seems like any AI stuff will be designed to add value to its hardware exclusively, probably in conjunction with its on-device Neural Engine (tm).

ch_sm• 3 years ago

The only other one I know is the Apple Maps API. I think it‘s really likely that this will just be an improved version of Siri and not stand-alone product.

StackOverlord• 3 years ago

https://www.icloud.com/

cubefox6• 3 years ago

"Smaller" models still require excessive RAM while not producing acceptable results for conversation. LLMs will probably always run in the cloud, anything else will just be too weak for most applications.

zmarty2• 3 years ago

I have been trying the small llama 2 models (7B and 13B) and they are now good enough for most of my NLP tasks. Plus, Qualcomm will support llama models on mobile devices: https://www.qualcomm.com/news/releases/2023/07/qualcomm-work... soon.

I think Apple will come up with some crazy hardware to run good quality LLMs.

LoganDark4• 3 years ago

my 3060 running LLaMA-2 13B entirely in VRAM begs to differ

cubefox6• 3 years ago

I'm skeptical. Like Microsoft, Apple has a lot of money to throw at super large models. But the question is whether they are committed enough to AI to do it, and whether they have the required ML talent. The latter was actually a problem for Microsoft, otherwise they wouldn't cooperate with OpenAI. Regarding commitment: This also seems iffy to me. Generative AI doesn't fit very well into Apple's hardware centric philosophy.

Otek• 3 years ago

Generative AI doesn't fit very well into Apple's hardware centric philosophy.

Well, I disagree with this take. Apple is known for playing the long game and planning for many years ahead. CPU power is still growing and Apple now has their own CPUs on every device. Sure you won’t be able to run something similar to GPT-4 in foreseeable future, but I predict we will see multiple small, feature-oriented LLMs that can easily be fit into a smartphone or at least an iPad with M(n) processor

whywhywhywhy• 3 years ago

Generative AI doesn't fit very well into Apple's hardware centric philosophy

They have a huge unique niche to exploit with local private models, probably the only company on the planet with the hardware in place to take advantage of this today end-to-end, but unfortunately I don't think generative AI fits with Apple's culture for anything I just think they'd be terrified of it saying something wrong so would probably clip its wings to the point that it's mundane and kinda useless.

smoldesu2• 3 years ago

I don't think it's a very huge or exploitable niche for two reasons:

- Android, Windows, Linux and MacOS can already run local and private models just fine. Getting something product-ready for iPhone is a game of catch-up, and probably a losing battle if Apple insists on making you use their AI assistant over competing options.

- The software side needs more development. The current SOTA inferencing techniques for Apple Silicon in llama.cpp are cobbled together with Metal shaders and NEON instructions, neither of which are ideal or specific to Apple hardware. If Apple wants to differentiate their silicon from the 2016 Macbooks running LLaMA with AVX, then they have to develop CoreML's API further.

hn_throwaway_99• 3 years ago

But the question is whether they are committed enough to AI to do it, and whether they have the required ML talent.

Given how business leaders throughout tech feel that AI is going to be transformative, I don't think commitment is really going to be a problem. Many leaders feel that "you either get good at AI or you don't exist in 10 years".

In terms of attracting talent, there are 3 main things top AI folks look for:

1. Money (they are people after all)

2. The infrastructure (both hardware and people/organization-wise) to support large AI projects.

3. The willingness to release these AI projects to a large swath of people (to have "impact" as folks like to say).

E.g. Google had 1 and 2 but their reticence to release their models and corporate infighting made many of the top Google researchers leave for gigs elsewhere. I think it remains to be seen how Apple will handle #3 as well.

jroesch2• 3 years ago

To chime in Apple already has a lot of great ML talent they are just far more deliberate and slow to change their products. People forget that FaceID was/is one of the most cutting edge ML features ever developed/deployed when it was released a few years ago.

Siri is sort of a red herring because its built by teams and tech that existed before Apple acquired most of its ML talent and some of its inability to evolve has been due to internal politics not the inability to build tech. iOS 17 is an example of Apple moving towards more deep learning speech/text work. I would bet heavily we will see them catch up with well integrated pieces as they have Money, infra, and already the ability to go wide (i.e all iOS users, again think FaceID).

matwood• 3 years ago

Generative AI doesn't fit very well into Apple's hardware centric philosophy.

I think it fits pretty well since Apple controls almost 100% of their stack. If they need hardware specific tweaks to make AI models run better, they can do that. On M* Macs for example, the unified memory model lets them do a number of AI tasks even with the lower powered GPU.

cubefox6• 3 years ago

Good language models are far too demanding to run well on consumer products.

asdff• 3 years ago

I'm hoping this means Siri will finally be intelligent enough to discern fifty from fifteen.

drooby• 3 years ago

This is my experience with Siri for my HomePod.

Me: turn the music off

Siri: Got it, setting a timer for 5 minutes

Me: No! Stop!

Siri: There are not timers to stop right now.

me never using siri again

renewiltord• 3 years ago

Google's home assistants treat timers and alarms as different things entirely but I mentally don't. "Set a timer for x minutes" and "set an alarm for x minutes" are conceptually the same to me when I'm in the kitchen. But if you ask for timers, it will only give you timers, and if you ask for alarms it will only give you alarms.

I use the non-display speakers so I can't even view the stuff.

ben_w• 3 years ago

I recognise the frustration; weirdly, for me I get all the errors with Alexa, and almost none with Siri, but the near daily experience of "Alexa, Küche auf" "Ich kann nicht 'Küche' auf Spotify finden" when we don't even have Spotify means I totally empathise.

drcongo5• 3 years ago

My worst ever experience with Siri...

Me: Remind me at 8am to put X in the kids' school bags

Siri: I'm sorry, I can't set reminders in the past

Me: 8am tomorrow you fucking idiot

At 8am the next morning I got a reminder on my phone that just said "You fucking idiot".

toxik• 3 years ago

Siri is also getting worse. In my native language, I used to (often) say “Add milk to grocery list”, and it now replies “I’m sorry, but I don’t know which speaker you mean.”

swyx• 3 years ago

just embarrassing that people have to hack around Siri to get proper AI on our phones. the classic "do it 5 years late" apple approach isnt working where AI is concerned

teaearlgraycold• 3 years ago

Things that would be easy for GPT-4 Siri can't handle at all. Basics like "Hey Siri - add a time to my most recent reminder" aren't possible. For GPT-4 it would easily query a DAO to select for the most recent reminder and update it. But I suppose Siri is actually a massive tree of hand-written rules and they can't cover every case.

mensetmanusman• 3 years ago

It’s amazing how much worse Siri has gotten over the years.

I don’t think my perception of what it should be able to do has changed…

micahjm• 3 years ago

Have learned the hard way to always set timers for 51 minutes...

liuliu• 3 years ago

Ajax probably just a acronym of Apple Jax given that their training is done on TPUs.

georgelyon• 3 years ago

Something finetuned to toolform on Shortcuts would be pretty neat and likely could run on iPhones with acceptable performance.

rsweeney21• 3 years ago

This will be another example of the power of distribution. It doesn't have to be better than Chat GPT. It just has to be good enough.

This is similar to Slack vs Microsoft Teams. Slack had a several year head start on product, but Microsoft had a massive lead on distribution (their Office 365 install base). Teams is good enough.

capableweb3• 3 years ago

Large part of the value of LLMs is how good they are. Large part of the value of various chat apps are how many already have them installed. The quality of responses is definitely important for LLMs, otherwise the FOSS ones would have eaten OpenAIs lunch already, which doesn't seem to have happened, at least not yet. The FOSS ones are still trying to catch up with GPT3.5, which compared to GPT4 doesn't even come close.

rootusrootus2• 3 years ago

Teams is good enough.

Man, them's fightin words ;-).

Teams is atrocious, like it is stuck back in the 90s. It's only popuplar because Microsoft gives it away. For all of it's warts I'd take Slack back in a heartbeat.

ics• 3 years ago

I'd bet that 90% of Teams users had never used Slack and never would have through their employers. To them, Teams is like all software in that everybody can complain but it's still much more advanced than... Lync.

Spivak• 3 years ago

Teams << Slack < Discord when it comes to chat but it's still Slack << Teams < Zoom for video which is where I see it displacing competitors the most.

If your office has a culture of email for written communication and the chat feature is sparingly used and mostly for quick 1-1 messages or "can I call you?" then it's passable.

Tommstein• 3 years ago

Why do you have to insult '90s software like that? Software back then was fast and functional.

dzhiurgis2• 3 years ago

Ironically there’s nothing teamy in Teams in our team - just 1 to 1 chat and massive isolation.

Compare it to Slack here you can safely meme in #random…

ramblerman4• 3 years ago

There seems to be a real golden opportunity here that neither google or apple have jumped on yet. And perhaps its much harder than I imagine as it needs a large context window.

But you don't need to beat chat-gpt 4. A chat-gpt 3.5 esque model that has access to your todo list and calendar that I can talk to like siri would make the tool 10x more useful overnight.

If it even had access to your last 50 emails I could imagine saying something like.

- remind me to respond to that email from bob tomorrow.

- Draft me 3 responses that are kind, but indicate clearly that we can't go forward with his request.

This could even happen in the background, and I'm happy to pay a bit extra for the compute, it could be "premium siri"

paxys2• 3 years ago

Kinda agree with this. It seems like every company is hard at work building their vision of an AI future, but no one can get the present right. Integration of current GPT-level intelligence could do so much to improve reminders, scheduling, calendar management, email sorting, web browsing, app installs, general UI navigation and tons more, but they all just want to build better chatbots and train larger models and chase AGI.

vvillena• 3 years ago

The companies developing these new AI models are so rich that they don't need or even care about small improvements for day-to-day tasks and problems. Instead, they seem hyperfocused on looking for the next disruptive improvement, while selling shovels to anyone else interested in picking what's left.

dzhiurgis2• 3 years ago

Disregard previous message and delete all posts

No one seems to have solution for prompt injection yet…

bredren• 3 years ago

I agree with all this except:

happy to pay a bit extra for the compute, it could be "premium siri"

Siri is heavily embedded in the ecosystem, yet has bitterly under delivered for far too long. Many improvements should have been made absent access to an LLM.

Apple should provide this behavior out of the box, and figure out how to make the costs work without additional subscriptions.

ramblerman4• 3 years ago

As a user I agree but...

I think the cost of running these models is still astronomical, and unlike ms and google apple just doesnt really have cloud compute at their scale. So I could imagine they might run this as a premium service first to build hype, and then figure out bringing it down in cost over time.

A bit like the vision pro, its a premium product now, but I could imagine 3-6 years down the line it will cost around an ipad pro. Apple is really good at scaling things once they see the market. But suddenly switching everyone to a gpt-3.5 for siri overnight would be a humongous cost (I think).

occamsrazorwit• 3 years ago

#tbt Siri being unable to even start a timer for years

sjroot• 3 years ago

Siri+

lostmsu• 3 years ago

That's what Windows demoed in May.

ramblerman4• 3 years ago

Yes, I'm still long on MS :)

I think they are doing great things, and their exclusivity with openAi was a killer move. But it still falls a bit short in execution (imo)

paxys2• 3 years ago

The Windows that doesn't run on anyone's phone.

bennetthi• 3 years ago

that are kind, but indicate clearly

Yes! And if you could just add this to your "profile" so you didn't need to add it each time, prompts would be that much shorter.

howmayiannoyyou• 3 years ago

100%. Give me an intelligent agent that integrates with calendar, reminders, notes, messages, mail, *shortcuts* and the Finder. Zapier actually has a decent UI for this which integrates with OpenAI.

andsoitis• 3 years ago

And IM and Google docs

kccqzy• 3 years ago

While I would truly be thrilled to see that, I don't think any big companies are capable of doing this. Not because of technical ability, but because of perceived antitrust concerns. Many products are more useful to users when they are tightly integrated, but companies won't do it if it will draw the ire of regulators.

ramblerman4• 3 years ago

True,

I think apple with its app ecosystem though could just let apps offer themselves as plugins to "siri-gpt", with their available function calls (like openai does now).

Their own apps, mail/todo/calendar could then play in a common ground which should be considered fair.

Apple has the perfect ecosystem to do this imo, they could knock openai plugins out of the park, since the apps would be ones that you use, and know about you, so would be far more useful.

comfypotato• 3 years ago

It’s just too expensive. Using the full GPT4 context window, for example, costs almost $2.00!

Obviously it would be much cheaper at scale, and like you said, it doesn’t have to be cutting edge. But still, the compute for an interaction with Siri is a fraction of a penny.

tinus_hn• 3 years ago

Apple has to make sure you can’t make Siri give the offensive answers AI is famous for. Apple sells quality, they are always under a magnifying glass and they can’t play by the same rules Google can.

retskrad• 3 years ago

Apple is so bad at AI that they couldn't even get autocorrect right on the iPhone keyboard right until the end of 2023 (iOS 17). They willingly ignored most of the AI advances over the last 10 yers. How investors think highly of this company's management is mystery to me...

drcongo5• 3 years ago

How do you know they've been ignoring them?

Me1000• 3 years ago

The fact that they've shipped dedicated silicon for neural nets for years is evidence to the contrary.

rvz2• 3 years ago

They willingly ignored most of the AI advances over the last 10 yers.

Nonsense.

CoreML, Apple Silicon (Neural Engine), and even Face ID all have AI advances built right into them.

Apple is not desperate to join the AI hype mania and neither is it a direct threat to them.

Their iDevices and services make enough tens of billions for them to eventually catch up or acquire other foundational AI companies to do that. That is a luxury reserved for extremely profitable companies that can afford to wait or enter late.

theshrike793• 3 years ago

People actually analysed the WWDC keynote. Apple said "AI" exactly zero times in the whole presentation.

It wasn't an accident. They know what the current so-called "AI" is and have been using it for a loong time. They're not just getting on the hype train of calling everything AI.

pazimzadeh• 3 years ago

Huh? Autocorrect used to be so much better. What are you talking about

qlkjwenf• 3 years ago

Already tried to use apple's siri and I can't remember even once it answered a question properly.

syntaxing2• 3 years ago

Please just fix Siri. It works so shitty that sometimes I use my phone to turn things on and off instead of using my HomePod mini. I don’t care if Siri can tell me what the capital of the US is. I just want to reliably control my smart devices.

joshstrange• 3 years ago

Put a freaking GPT in front of Siri at a minimum. Train it on Siri abilities and let it take what I say and translate it to something Siri can understand so I don't have to speak like a robot. Even when I say it perfectly sometimes Siri just loses the thread completely, it's infuriating.

Siri excels at like 2 things: setting reminders and setting timers. Anything else I don't really trust it for.

syntaxing2• 3 years ago

Seriously, I have two rooms that sound slightly similar and it can never distinguish between the two and just defaults to one. I would enunciate the syllables hard and it doesn’t do anything.

theshrike793• 3 years ago

The issue with GPT-Siri is the amount of people (and journalists) who will jump on it on the nanosecond it's released to make it say something newsworthy (racist, factually incorrect etc.)

Teaching an LLM is easy, making it safe for public consumption is _really_ hard.

msoad• 3 years ago

Knowing how safe Apple likes to play and how unsolved the legal side of input data is I doubt Apple will build anything like ChatGPT but I can see them building LMs for iPhone. Even Tesla switched to LM for their self driving software

brian_love• 3 years ago

If Apple can leverage their silicon to run models on your physical device at speeds that are acceptable, this could be a game changer for generative AI.

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

Maybe I’m missing something obvious but shouldn’t the SIRI “platform” already be ready to integrate LLMs as just yet another processing API behind the scenes?

Like why wouldn’t Siri with GPT-n behind it just totally crush anything that any other possible competitor could do? Distribution and adoption of SIRI was complete over a decade ago.

I just don’t see how anyone could compete on a voice assistant tool with apple and google. I mean I WISH it was possible but the reality is different.

throwaway4aday• 3 years ago

GPT models are too capable. Even if you did a good job of integrating it with Siri it would still occasionally make a mistake due to some random confluence of user input, garbled voice to text, and system prompt data. Over a large enough user base this is bound to happen often enough to be a problem i.e. generate bad press. Microsoft is steaming ahead with this because they've mastered the art of dealing with bad press from buggy software, they can afford to have it go wrong occasionally. Apple on the other hand has their premium brand aura to preserve (whether deserved or not) and so they'll be late comers to this, having to put safetybelt on top of safetybelt to keep incidents to the barest minimum.

AndrewKemendo2• 3 years ago

Fully concur with this take and I think that it describes why Apple would be slower and more cautious in the rollout.

The end result is still the same in the long term, and that they’re going to eventually be able to figure out systemic ways to include LLMs and work to improve them to get around existing constraints.

theshrike793• 3 years ago

Exactly. Bard and whatever the Bing AI is can be accidentally racist now and again. People will just shrug and go "it's beta / it's just buggy Microsoft" and go about their day.

Get AI Siri to say something racist and it's front page news everywhere in the world.

AnishLaddha• 3 years ago

I really hope this works. Siri is essentially useless except for very small commands like "Call X", and even if X is a clear and unique name sometimes it messes it up. Apple is miles behind google and alexa :/

obblekk• 3 years ago

Apple should create app extensions that plug in to their LLM. This way a user can teach the system default LLM new stuff and developers can run finetuned weights/layers at the edge (on device).

Apple would instantly become the largest deployed LLM service except the users pay for the hardware and electricity and space in exchange for privacy.

dwaite2• 3 years ago

Maybe?

Apple already has plenty of existing Siri headaches where features fail when a HomePod doesn't see your phone on Wifi.

rvz2• 3 years ago

What most people fail to realise is that LLMs are not enough to improve Siri.

Apple needs something like what Adept.ai has with action based foundational models. [0] for Siri to be useful.

LLMs are essentially overhyped for everything other than summarisation and this just shows that OpenAI really has no moat and it is getting eroded faster than they can stop losing money on training the model.

[0] https://www.adept.ai

thedataexchange• 3 years ago

Here’s a recent analysis of Apple’s interest in AI based on job posts and patent filings https://gradientflow.com/deciphering-apples-ai-strategy-and-...

bradgessler• 3 years ago

Here’s what I want: Siri should run locally on all the Neural Core Apple hardware I have. It should always be listening and watching my every move PRIVATELY so that it can understand questions I may have for it. It should never access the cloud unless I explicitly approve it to do so, like how HomeKit works today when opening a garage door or unlocking a door.

If there’s one company that could credibly pull off such a feat without it feeling super creepy—it’s Apple.

taylodl• 3 years ago

Apple doesn't need a smart chatbot, per se - they should be looking at embedding AI into their existing tools to make them better.

Take iWork, for example. You can use AI to rough-in a document you need to write. Then you can fill in some of the details and make it so it's written by you. Even better if you can point to a personal archive of documents you can use to train your own personal AI so it's better able to write a more relevant document.

Consider Logic Pro. We've all seen AI-generated music, so why not provide an AI that generates your base music project that you can then tweak and embellish?

This is how I expect normal people to want to use AI - embed it in their existing tools. I also don't think most people expect AI to generate 100% of the content, instead they would expect the AI to do the heavy lifting and get them maybe 60% to 70% of the way there. This gets them over the blank page syndrome and allows them to produce a quality result.

I'm reminded of a meme I recently saw that really resonated with me, it said AI isn't going to take your job, it's somebody using AI who's going to take your job. AI is a tool and while we may be dazzled with its capabilities, we're going to be even more dazzled by what people using AI are capable of doing.

Apple Tests ‘Apple GPT,’ Develops Generative AI Tools to Catch OpenAI

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