# 103a How Apple is Quietly Building its Generative AI Empire
Fresh & Hot curated AI happenings in one snack. Never miss a byte 🍔
This snack byte will take approx 4minutes to consume.
AI BYTE # 📢: How Apple is Quietly Building its Generative AI Empire
⭐ Apple is known for its secrecy and innovation, but when it comes to Gen AI, the company has been surprisingly silent.
While rivals like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI have been making headlines with their generative AI products and features, such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Gemini, Apple has been quietly working on its own AI capabilities behind the scenes.
Generative AI is a technology that can create original and creative content, such as text, images, music, and code, by using advanced algorithms and machine learning techniques. It has the potential to transform various industries and domains, including content creation, entertainment, education, and health care.
Apple’s goal appears to be operating Gen AI through mobile devices, which would allow AI chatbots and apps to run on the phone’s own hardware and software rather than be powered by cloud services in data centers. This would enable faster, more secure, and more personalized user experiences, as well as reduce the dependency on internet connectivity.
One of the key areas where Apple is expected to use Gen AI is news and media. The company has been approaching news publishers and offering them millions of dollars to access their content and data. The list of potential partners includes some of the most prominent media outlets, such as Condé Nast, NBC News, IAC, and Axel Springer.
The reason for this move is likely to improve Siri, Apple’s virtual assistant, which has lagged behind Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa in terms of intelligence and functionality. By using Gen AI, Apple could enhance Siri’s natural language understanding and generation, as well as its ability to provide relevant and personalized news and information to users.
Apple could also use Gen AI to create new features and services for its existing platforms, such as Apple News, Apple Music, and Apple TV. For example, it could use Gen AI to create personalized playlists, recommendations, summaries, and captions for its users, based on their preferences, interests, and behavior.
It could also use Gen AI to generate original content, such as articles, podcasts, videos, and shows, to compete with other content providers and platforms.
Apple has already shown some signs of its Gen AI capabilities, albeit in a low-key manner. In October 2023, Apple and Columbia University collaboratively released an open-source multimodal language model called Ferret, which can generate text, images, and code from natural language prompts.
In this month, Apple has introduced two new research papers with new techniques for 3D avatars and efficient language model inference, which could enable more immersive visual experiences and allow complex AI systems to run on consumer devices like iPhones and iPads.
However, Apple’s Gen AI push is not without challenges and ethical considerations.
One of the main issue’s is the impact of Gen AI on the news industry, which could face disruption, competition, and loss of trust from the use of AI-generated content. Moreover, Apple will have to balance its privacy-centric approach with the need to access and process large amounts of data to train and run its Gen AI models.
As the company prepares to launch its first Gen AI product, likely the iPhone 16, in late 2024, it will be interesting to see how it will leverage these AI capabilities to create new value and experiences for its users and partners.