CHATBOTS seemed to go from amusing experiment to Next Big Thing in a matter of weeks. The big boys piled in, and a race began. Nobody wanted to be left out. The major players are now all in place, as Apple has decided to join in. It’s to develop its own system called, unimaginatively, AppleGPT. According to Apple’s CEO Tim Cook, the company will use AI in a “thoughtful” way.
Building these large language models requires oodles of data, and the obvious source for that is the internet. Swiping data from the internet without asking is an annoyance for Apple, a company that takes privacy a little more seriously than the rest. Google has just quietly updated its terms and conditions to make it clear that all publicly available data will be used to train its AI systems. This includes social media, blogs, news, comments, reviews, website profiles, cookies, and other web activity. Basically, everything.