Following the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3 (and subsequent launches), everyone seemed to have an artificial intelligence project on the boil. Everything, that is, besides Apple. Apple’s own Siri voice assistant is a sort of AI but when it comes to generative artificial intelligence, there doesn’t seem to be much going on.
Part of that could be laid at the door of the notoriously secretive company’s usual policies but, a new report from The Information suggests there’s also some internal conflict happening behind closed doors. At the heart of it is the voice assistant that has appeared as a character in both The Big Bang Theory and The Lego Batman Movie.
Siri-ously, Apple?
Problems behind the scenes and a general dislike of the Siri voice assistant are apparently behind Apple’s slow pace in the generative AI race. The company had three engineers who are now working on a similar large-language model to OpenAI’s tech. The only problem is that they’re doing so for Google, having defected over to the competition. That’s one issue Apple is facing with its drive into AI — hanging onto employees. Part of the problem is Siri itself.
The voice assistant is famously underdeveloped compared with competitor products and now with the advent of generative tech, it’s falling even further behind. The team behind the company’s upcoming mixed-reality headset has reportedly expressed frustration with the tech as a method of control for the hardware. They even “…considered building alternative methods for controlling the device using voice commands”, though this idea was later discarded.
Read More: ‘Hey Siri’: Virtual assistants are listening to children and then using the data
Siri’s performance, as demanded by the company’s upper management, also acts as an anchor for development. Google’s Bard, Microsoft, and OpenAI’s attempts, and most other generative AI systems tend to spit out hinky behaviour when fed certain inputs. Those results aren’t something Apple management is willing to put up with. Training an AI to that level of perfection is putting the company in last place.
“The incidents explain why many former employees in Apple’s AI group are skeptical that the company will be successful in developing the next wave of AI products based on LLMs. The company’s senior leaders haven’t shown much stomach for the kinds of headline-grabbing gaffes ChatGPT and similar services have stumbled into over the last several months,” reports The Information.
Source: The Information