Anonymous sources close to Apple have reported to Bloomberg that Apple is developing its own AI to rival the large language models (LLMs) released by OpenAI, Microsoft and Google’s Alphabet.
The report specifies that Apple is focusing its attention on developing its own LLM, dubbed ‘AppleGPT’ by engineers on the project.
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After Bloomberg broke the news, Apple’s share price soared by $3.80 per share to over $197.
The news also broke soon after Microsoft and Meta announced the open source release of the Llama2 LLM.
Research Director for GlobalData Josep Bori believed Microsoft’s announcement to be a “significant milestone” for the industry of generative AI, regarding its decision to release the LLM in open source as having “significant implications for industry economics.”
According to the original Bloomberg report, Apple executives have “yet to devise a clear strategy for releasing the technology to consumers.”
Apple’s indecision over the release of their AI is not coincidental to Microsoft and Meta’s open source release.
Whilst OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public free of charge, Bori states that Meta and Microsoft have gone further by “releasing the ‘internal weights’ of their model, something no one else has done.”
This allows companies to “install an instance of Llama in its own datacentre (or in its private cloud), upload the initial weights, and effectively run an already fully pre-trained Llama in house.”
Bori believes this will eventually lead developers like OpenAI to run into issues trying to “monetise” such technology.
If Llama2 is “as good as OpenAI’s GPT”, he asks, “they have a problem… how is anybody else going to monetise these models if Meta gives them for free?”
This could be particularly worrying for Apple, since the company has had its fair share of press accusing the it of lagging drastically behind in the AI boom.
Despite this, Bloomberg’s news did result in Microsoft’s shares slipping about one percent.
Until the release of AppleGPT, it remains unclear whether Apple’s AI will rival current LLMs or if this release was an attempt to remain relevant in the AI race.
