Apple Paying Attention to ChatGPT AI Arms Race?

ChatGPT is all the tech world can talk about lately, and with good reason. An AI-based tool is impressive, but there are plenty of things to worry about – copyright infringement, plagiarism, classroom use, even job loss – so it’s no surprise that people who make a living are worried about AI, which, it would seem, can write well. But there are also bright-eyed tech companies that see the future—the ability for computers to communicate naturally and create content that businesses can actually use, at a scale, speed, and cost that humans can’t match.

But ChatGPT, Google Bard, and Microsoft Bing chat are only a small part of the generative AI revolution. For the past year, the art world has been buzzing about new generative AI art tools and worrying about the same issues – bias, copyrights, lost jobs, etc. e. Deep fakes, where neural networks replace people in videos with stunning realism, were the pinnacle. iceberg.

These tools are not just a flash in a saucepan. They are in their infancy and getting better Very fast. Big tech companies like Google and Microsoft see this new generative AI as a huge part of our entire future. Making a name for themselves and taking a leading position is as important to them as dominating the Internet in the 90s.

But there is one player that is not in the game: Apple. The most valuable technology company in the world seems to be completely missing the full revolution in computing. Apple is familiar with artificial intelligence — it sparked an assistant revolution with Siri — but it has also squandered its lead by not investing enough to fend off the competition.

Is history repeating itself with generative AI? Or does Apple have something amazing up its sleeve and is just incredibly secretive as always?

AI chat is old, AI creation is new

All the biggest tech companies have been screaming about AI for years now. AI that isolates and analyzes your speech for dictation and voice assistants, and can also distinguish voices for personalized results. An AI that puts together recorded sounds to “talk” to you. AI that isolates parts of images so they can be easily edited. AI that identifies objects and people to help you search. AI that allows you to highlight text on any image.

Apple does it all. It’s so important to the company that they build the Neural Engine into all of their chips, specialized hardware that speeds up such machine learning tasks. Apple is even working on the biggest challenge in artificial intelligence, self-driving cars.

But generative AI it’s something else. This is a newer class of AI that creates something completely new with almost no text input. Yes, training models takes a lot of time and a lot of data, but then the models that users will run are relatively small and, it would seem, can create an infinite number of new things. An AI that can find all the potatoes in your photo library is completely different from one that can draw potatoes from scratch in a variety of art styles.

Mark Khachman / IDG

ChatGPT, Bard and Bing

The generative artificial intelligence technology that is making headlines right now is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The advanced chatbot and tools based on it are already being used in the business world to create articles, emails, templates and more, which is causing some controversy. Students use it to write entire papers from a small prompt, and the results are good enough to start a race to develop good tools for teachers to identify ChatGPT-written assignments.

Because it has been trained on a ton of web data that, while outdated, is still relevant for many things, it can almost be like the search engine you are chatting with. This infuriated Google so much that it announced its own rival conversational AI product, Bard, which isn’t quite ready to be tried out in the world yet, but is coming soon. The public display provided incorrect information about the James Webb Space Telescope, so Google clearly has some work to do.

Microsoft also announced a new conversational search feature that you can start using right now in the Bing and Edge browser. It is built on ChatGPT with some improvements and modifications.

This is more than just toys or curiosities. These are real tools that people use to do real work and realize creative projects. It’s only the early days, and sometimes it doesn’t feel like it’s ready for the world at large, but the pace of improvement and innovation is staggering – AI models are doubling in complexity and sophistication every six months.

Stable diffusion, intermediate stage, DALL-E

And it’s not just the written word. We all had a good laugh at the silly hints with DALL-E 2 last year, but with further training and improvements, these generative AI art tools have become suitable for much more than just creating anime-style images of cats scuba diving with aquariums. their heads.

Midjourney and Stable Diffusion have become so good that they create works of art that could easily grace the cover of a magazine, and in a few minutes there can be several dozen of them.

These tools can do much more than just create brand new images in a wide variety of styles. They can change the input images. The App Store is already flooded with avatar and profile maker apps that use this software to take multiple photos of your face and reshape them in amazing ways by changing physical characteristics without anyone knowing. For example, wearing sunglasses that look completely real.

It was a gimmick last year, but the technology is moving so fast that it’s already a tool. Adobe has already improved many of its apps with AI-powered imaging tools, one-click photo recovery, and vastly improved object removal. But the company plans to soon add significant generative AI to its toolbox, allowing you to literally insert images into existing photos and drawings that look like they fit.

Dalle2.app

Narrow window for action

And where is Apple in all this? The company positions itself as a technological leader, especially in the creative space. But, aside from a few blog posts from a machine learning research site and some relatively simple library optimizations for Apple Silicon, Apple Seems sit this one out. I mean, I think Divam Gupta’s DiffusionBee is very cool, but it’s a small independent third party app that hasn’t been updated in quite a while and is already behind the modern art of AI imaging.

This technology will be completely transformative. Don’t believe me? Check out OpenAI’s research on music creation. He creates new music in various styles, including singing, out of nowhere. Microsoft’s VALL-E can generate amazingly realistic voices that sound very close to a real person, using only a tiny fragment of that person’s voice as input. It can even mimic various emotional states.

Many of these and dozens of other projects are still in the research phase. It is not difficult to find flaws in any of them. But the path from research to the real world will be fast, and finding flaws will become vanishingly difficult.

Apple has the tools to build its own generative AI chatbot with the Neural Engine built into iPhone and Mac chips that can handle up to 15.8 trillion operations per second, as well as Core ML and machine learning APIs. But we don’t see any movement inside Cupertino. Accuracy and speed are paramount for AI-powered chatbots – shares and trust in Google plummeted this week after a bug in Bard’s chatbot – so it’s possible it’s working behind the scenes with Siri. But with a plethora of tools at its disposal, the question remains: Is Apple paying attention at all?

If Apple does not keep a close eye on the field of artificial intelligence, Apple may not realize how fast it is developing. It took a year for generative AI to go from being a “wacky toy for an online research project” to “an announcement duel between Microsoft and Google.” In another two years, these tools will be ten times better, and there will be many more of them. It will be difficult for you to tell what is real and what is completely created by artificial intelligence from nothing. If you have big ideas but limited artistic skills, generative AI will make your dreams come true much easier.

Apple

With Siri, Apple has been at the forefront of bringing the AI ​​voice assistant to the masses. As this technology has evolved, Apple has lagged far behind, and now Siri is often viewed as a letdown that cannot be compared to Google Assistant or Alexa. When it comes to generative AI, Apple doesn’t even have the first mover advantage it did with Siri. Technology companies, big and small, are already delivering powerful tools. Without any action, Apple will simply finish producing some of the hardware that will run our future, based on generative artificial intelligence.

Without realizing the full power of this new technology in its own software and services, Apple will let everyone else determine the state of the art for what could be the most important shift in computing in decades. The company may be fine with that, but as hardware sales decline and Apple’s software and services share grows, it really can’t afford not to be a leader in the generative AI revolution.

Of course, Apple is one of the most secretive tech companies, especially when it comes to software. Apple may have big teams hard at work bringing generative AI features to iMovie, Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Photos, Mail, Messages, and the entire iWork suite. All this can be completely transformed with the help of powerful generative AI tools. We know that about a year ago, Apple bought at least one generative artificial intelligence company, AI Music. It would make sense to see at least a tool to “create an original instant soundtrack for your video” in Apple products this year.

We may not hear anything about Apple’s generative AI at all, and then at WWDC, BAM! World-class Generative AI across all Apple products!

I hope so, because if Apple is late with such transformational technology, it will doom its software to years of falling behind its competitors for years to come.