Apple is working on creating a ChatGPT rival. Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple has formed a new team called Answers, Knowledge and Information (AKI) for this project.
Apple had turned down an opportunity to buy Bing from Microsoft in 2020. But that was before chatbots were a thing. Until a couple of years ago, Apple felt Google was the best option for users, and because of the multi-billion dollar agreement it had with the Mountain View company, there was no incentive to build a search engine of its own. Things have changed since then. Google is facing an antitrust lawsuit, which could spell the end of its partnership with Apple. More importantly, AI services are so popular, that they could replace search engines.
This is why Apple Intelligence was created, Everyone wanted AI, Apple wanted to give them something. It opted to partner with OpenAI and integrated ChatGPT into Siri. It was a big mess, and Apple Intelligence wasn't even available for most people until a few months ago, and even the latest experience of the AI is not great. Sure it can do a lot of things like image generation, writing assistance, etc. using on-device models. But it is not impressive. That, and rival services, have been constantly evolving.
It's not that Apple doesn't know what to do with AI, it's a question of building AI in a privacy-friendly manner. Apple has always been known for its pro-privacy stance, as opposed to its rivals, who don't blink twice about gobbling up user data, and selling them to third-parties. It's not easy to build an artificial intelligence service, let alone one that protects the privacy of users. And there's also the need to train language models, which is likely the bigger hurdle for Apple. Take Proton's Lumo for example, it's a privacy-friendly chatbot, but it barely has features that one may find in Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. That's because it doesn't use user data to train its models, and it actually uses third-party LLMs. Apple needs to be careful here.
After reshuffling its internal AI team due to some issues with Apple Intelligence, the AKI team was formed. The team is exploring various in-house AI services to create a new ChatGPT-like search experience. Its initial state is called an "answer engine", which as the name suggests will crawl the web to retrieve data and respond to a user's query. The app will be a standalone ChatGPT-rival that may also be integrated in Siri, Spotlight and Safari. The Cupertino company has also been advertising job opportunities for the project, looking to hire people who have experience with search algorithms and engine development.
Apple has to play catch up in the AI market, that's a big ask, but it may not have a choice.
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