Apple's Secret Gen-AI Weapon...
Maybe the Smartest Company in Tech Doesn't Want What It Doesn't Have for a Reason.
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Let me begin (and end) by introducing myself as Dr. William A. Lambos, neuroscientist, data scientist, and licensed neuropsychologist. I write a lot about AI, but not exclusively. See my previous screeds on this Substack to learn more.
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The site “MacRumors” has been around since early 2000, and is considered a pioneering blog of the tech industry that reports on “all things Apple.” On April 15, 2024 it published a summary of Apple’s (suspected) efforts in the Gen-AI space, and large language models in particular called “Apple GPT: What We Know About Apple's Work on Generative AI.”
What does Mac Rumors tell us about mighty Apple’s current forays in Gen-AI?
Not a lot. Let’s see…there’s this “Apple GPT” LLM used internally that’s supposed to be about a powerful as ChatGPT 3.5. The model has been trained on 2 billion parameters, and reportedly can cite the sources for it’s training data. But Apple has no release date and no known plans to roll any such product out:
Apple reportedly does not have a "clear strategy" for how it will create a generative AI product for consumers. Apple is experimenting with Siri enhancements, software that generates videos and images, and multimodal AI technology that works with images, videos, and text.
Excuse me? How does the most adept tech company in existence not have a Gen-AI strategy, in the current climate, where the only thing anybody in the entire tech industry (almost) can talk about is Gen-AI and the future of autonomous machines???
Maybe it’s because Gen-AI is similar in its efficacy to how one of my patients described a sleep medication he had been prescribed: “That s**t don’t work!”
And neither do GPTs.
I am one of the declining number of us “Godfathers” who have been around both tech and the AI field since their relative beginnings. If you are old enough to remember, there was a time in 1995 when Microsoft donated $25 million to Apple to keep it alive (as a company) just so Microsoft could avoid an antitrust action against its monopoly status in the personal computer world! If you’re old enough to remember that, then you’re old enough to remember that Apple as a tech company has fierce independence in its competitive DNA. Apple doesn’t care who's doing what with whatever the current tech du jour is. It will research products for years before deciding to scrap or go with one. And it scraps many more than it develops (Apple Car, anyone?).
Moreover, I’ve been forecasting the crash of the Gen-AI profit model and associated investment space before the end of this year (2024). and my guess is, so has Apple. So I’d like to offer that Apple is in no hurry to do anything with Gen-AI other than to look like it’s working on a Gen-AI consumer product. That’s it. And why?
Because Apple, being the adult tech company in the room, knows that Gen-AI is a lot like certain sleep medications: “that s**t don’t work!”
Thanks for reading!
Bill Lambos