Apple Adding Generative AI To iPhone, Changing How Users Interact With Devices

Apple's goal is to significantly impact how iPhone users interact with their mobile devices, potentially enhancing capabilities as well as tying them more closely to Apple-provided services. JL

The Indian Express reports:

Apple is doubling down on its effort to add generative AI-powered conversational capabilities to its digital assistant Siri. Siri would gain deeper integration with the Shortcuts automation tool as part of the iOS 18 update. The Siri team has plans to incorporate language models, enabling users to automate complex tasks using generative AI. Apple’s large language model will be called Ajax GPT, said to be more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5. It could support over 175 billion parameters. Ajax is said to be capable of recognising and generating text, images, and videos. This capability enables users to automate tasks like converting pictures into GIFs, generating 3D scenes, and more.Apple is doubling down on its effort to add generative AI-powered conversational capabilities to its digital assistant Siri, suggests a report from The Information. The company is said to be spending millions of dollars a day to develop an in-house language model called Ajax.

 

The report highlights that Siri would gain deeper integration with the Shortcuts automation tool as a part of the iOS 18 update, likely to be released in late 2024. Additionally, it is also said that the Siri development team has plans to incorporate language models, enabling users to automate complex tasks using generative AI.Apple’s generative AI model Ajax is said to be capable of recognising and generating text, images, and videos. This capability is said to enable users to automate tasks like converting pictures into GIFs, generating 3D scenes, and more.

 

The report focuses on Johnny Giannandrea’s role at Apple, who was previously with Google, and how Apple recently commissioned a 16-member team named the “Foundational Model,” which will conduct long-term research on multimodal AI. Apple is said to be spending millions of dollars a day on this project.

Johnny, the senior vice president of Machine Learning and AI Strategy at Apple, directly reports to the CEO Tim Cook. Before this, Johnny was at Google, leading Machine Intelligence, Research, and Search teams at Google.

An earlier report from Bloomberg also highlighted that Apple’s large language model will be called Ajax GPT, which is said to be more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5; hence, it could support over 175 billion parameters. Not just Apple, Google too has been incorporating its generative AI, Duet, within the Android ecosystem, where it recently added AI capabilities to its “At a Glance” widget.