Apple's GPT chatbot is already being used internally

Last week, news broke out that Apple is working on a ChatGPT-like app of its own. According to a new report, the chatbot is already being used internally by the company's employees.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that the upcoming service is built on a large language model (LLM), and that its framework is called Ajax. The app has been dubbed as Apple GPT by the company's workers.

Apple's workers are using its GPT chatbot internally

Apple is yet to decide what its chatbot experience for consumers will be like, so we don't know what we can expect if and when the company decides to integrate its chatbot in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. Gurman reports that Apple GPT is currently being used internally as a generative AI tool. This includes AppleCare support staff using the chatbot to assist customers. He does not mention the details about the tool's generative capabilities, but that's probably confidential information. It may also be a good way to test the bot without releasing it to the public.

The Cupertino company is late to the AI-powered chat, because its rivals have already launched their own chatbot services. It is also worth noting that the official apps for Microsoft's Bing AI, Google Bard, and Open AI's ChatGPT are all available on iOS. Since the competition has a head start, and you could argue that Apple's hand could be forced by market demand, investors may not want the company to lag behind. It does make sense, the AI-chatbot market could be the future to look towards, and a lucrative one at that. The Verge reports that Meta's Llama 2 AI-model, and Samsung's research about integrating AI-chatbots in its phones, shows how quickly technology giants are adapting to the situation. Apple company cannot afford to overlook it.

Could Apple GPT be the future of Siri?

Siri was once considered an innovative technology when it debuted. But now, the digital assistant has become the center of jokes no thanks to its poor voice recognition, the execution of incorrect, and often completely irrelevant commands. This has left iPhone users frustrated, more so because Google, Amazon and Samsung have improved their own voice assistants greatly over the years. Why can't Apple do the same? This has been a concern for several years, it needs to improve Siri in order to catch up with the modern standards, and integrating Apple GPT could give it a much-needed boost. Gurman notes that Siri with ChatGPT-like capabilities could be useful for handling tasks like writing emails by generating the text, instead of the user dictating it.

Apple is no stranger to AI technology, many of its apps and device-specific features use some form of it, such as fall detection on the Apple Watch. John Giannandrea, who worked as Google’s former head of search and artificial intelligence, joined Apple's ranks as its AI chief in 2018. The company has been improving and adding features that use on-device machine learning, on a steady basis. However, Apple needs to tread with caution when it comes to AI technology that users can interact with, as chatbots have often been criticized for providing incorrect information, which has led to some serious issues such as fabricated cases that were used by a lawyer.  The Cupertino company's Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook recently called for broader regulations of AI services to ensure safety risks for users are minimized.

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