Panic at Apple. The company is pumping 3 million dollars a day

Last year's premiere of the ChatGPT service caused a real earthquake in the tech industry. Practically all tech giants have already managed to respond, except for Apple.

Microsoft has invested a colossal amount of money in OpenAI and built its own AI assistant on the ChatGPT engine, which is integrated with the Bing search engine, Edge browser, Windows, and Office suite.

Google, in response, has created a service called Bard, which is currently being tested from the web page level, but is about to be integrated with Android smartphones.

Amazon has already announced a completely new version of the Alexa assistant, which was built based on generative artificial intelligence technology. Soon, the improved AI is expected to be made available to the first users of Echo speakers.

And what does Apple have to say about all this? For now, they have primarily changed the wake command of their assistant to "Siri" instead of "Hey Siri".

"Apple's management was taken aback by the sudden craze associated with artificial intelligence and has been trying to make up for lost time since the end of last year," - reports Mark Gurman from Bloomberg. According to one of his sources, sleeping through the revolution "is internally considered a big defeat".

Apple is reportedly developing its own large language model - internally referred to as "Apple GPT" - comparing it with the competition and exploring possibilities for its use in its products. As for investments related to the development of AI, it's said to be about a billion dollars a year.

For years, Apple has placed a great emphasis on privacy and the philosophy of "on-device", ensuring that the most important operations related to phone management are performed directly on the user's device. "What happens on your iPhone, stays on your iPhone" - the company asserted during one of its more prominent campaigns.

Meanwhile, large language models require processing of gigantic amounts of data and computational power that goes beyond what today's consumer devices have to offer. That's why most services based on generative AI operate entirely in the cloud.

According to Gurman, Apple's management is arguing about how future AI services should work at all. There are three options: building tools that work on the device, focusing on the cloud, or a hybrid approach.

Supposedly, Apple's AI is being developed comprehensively, and eventually, it intends to power a whole range of products, services, and applications. It's not just about a smarter Siri, but also generating responses to messages, intelligently creating playlists in Apple Music, assisting in document editing and slideshow presentations, or even automated app writing for iOS.

Current plans are expected to implement generative AI and a smarter Siri in next year's iOS 18 system, but everything will depend on the progress of work.