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Apple reportedly has AI chatbot in progress

GPT project is under way, but lacks clear direction

Sometimes it feels like artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots are taking over the world, with the likes of ChatGPT, Bing Chat and more stealing headlines daily. Amid all this cacophony, though, Apple has remained tight-lipped. Well, now we know why: it’s allegedly working on its own chatbot that could one day compete with ChatGPT and others.

That idea comes from Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman, a reporter with an impressive track record of leaking Apple’s closely held secrets. According to Gurman, Apple has “built its own framework to create large language models” or LLMs. These are essentially the scaffolds that hold up AI chatbots. Internally, the tool is being dubbed ‘Apple GPT’.

Siri could eventually gain AI superpowers, making it smarter and more responsive, if rumours prove accurate.

Apple hasn’t made any public announcements around developing its own take on this sort of technology, and Gurman asserts that it was “caught flat-footed in the past year with the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google Bard and Microsoft’s Bing AI”.

The company’s reticence is thought to be due in part to concerns over privacy. AI chatbots such as ChatGPT have caused alarm among artists, writers and other creatives whose work has been harvested without permission in order to train the LLMs that power chatbots. As well as that, information you give to a chatbot could be used to send you targeted advertising and build profiles about you, which many might object to. Instead, Apple is apparently working out how to avoid those problems with its own chatbot.