Major technology companies have been engaged in a fierce race in the generative artificial intelligence market since the beginning of this year, and Google and Microsoft are leading the race so far . Both seek to dominate the new era of AI-driven search that has already begun, all amid near silence from Apple.
The development of artificial intelligence is not new to Apple, which released 12 years ago the voice assistant service Siri, which is based on artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to recognize speech, understand and implement the request.
And Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, told investors during the month of February: “Artificial intelligence will be the main focus of the company, and indicated the ways that the company is already using features; Such as: detecting faults in the Apple Watch and iPhone phones.
But why has Apple not actually entered the generative artificial intelligence race yet, and is it building a large language model that competes with the (PaLM 2) model from Google, the first and direct competitor to the (GPT- 4) model presented by (OpenAI) last March, which is used by Microsoft in their products?
Chatbot race:
earlier this month; Google announced a series of features and products that rely on artificial intelligence in its work at its annual developer conference ( Google I / O 2023 ), including: making the Bard chatbot available for public use in 180 countries, and adding the assistant (Duet AI) in Its Workspace suite, and other new features in Gmail, Google Photos, and Maps.
But Google is not alone in doing this. Microsoft joined it last Tuesday; It also announced during its annual developer conference (Build 2023) about its new artificial intelligence, such as: Bing Chat support for extensions, the integration of artificial intelligence into Windows 11, its application store, and much more.
Apple’s wait-and-see approach:
Apple has usually adopted a wait-and-see approach to emerging technologies, and this has often succeeded with it, for example: it was not the inventor of the tablet, but the iPad is now the one that commands the largest market share in the tablet market.
Also, it has not yet entered the foldable phone market, while it was preceded by Samsung, its traditional competitor in the smart phone market, and Google also preceded it this year. As it announced its foldable (Pixel Fold) phone at the developer conference, however; There are rumors that the foldable iPhone, which may be known as (iPhone Flip), could be put on the market by Apple in 2025.
And based on the statements of (Tim Cook), the company’s CEO, it seems that Apple may take a similar approach with generative artificial intelligence, as Cook said in response to a question related to generative artificial intelligence on Apple’s earnings call this month: “I think it is very important that it be This step is well thought out, and we should study how to deal with AI problems first; There are a number of issues that need to be resolved.”
But with the rapid development of artificial intelligence, there is no doubt that Apple risks falling behind its competitors, as Apple has fallen behind in certain categories already, for example: the HomePod smart speakers did not reach the market until years after the arrival of the Amazon Echo and Google Home – Both have a much higher market share than Apple in the smart speaker category – despite all the success the company has achieved so far.
Apple is preparing to enter the artificial intelligence market:
A report from ( The Wall Street Journal ) revealed that Apple is currently building a large language model for a chatbot that will compete with ChatGPT and Bard from Google, people familiar with the matter told the newspaper.
Its efforts in this field are led by John Giannandrea, former head of artificial intelligence at Google, who joined Apple in 2018.
in addition to; Apple is working to employ a large number of researchers and scientists in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning at the level of many sectors, the most important of which are smart models for creating visual content, as (Techcrunch) monitored that Apple published no less than 12 job advertisements to search for experts in generative artificial intelligence. From the end of April until early last week.
The Wall Street Journal also indicated that Apple prevented its employees from using ChatGPT, and other artificial intelligence tools such as: the smart assistant (Copilot) on Microsoft’s GitHub platform – for fear of leaking confidential company data, because user inputs are sent to the companies developing these. Tools to help train AI models, according to an internal document seen by the Journal.
Does Apple focus at this year’s developer conference on artificial intelligence?
If the reports and leaks about Apple working on a large language model of its own are correct, then Apple will be the latest company to enter the generative artificial intelligence market, after the entry of major companies such as: Microsoft, Google and Meta, by providing language models, tools and features based on artificial intelligence.
This coincides with the approaching date of Apple’s annual conference for developers in early June, which may give the possibility of the company announcing the integration of generative artificial intelligence into its products or announcing new smart tools or platforms through which it will officially enter this race.
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