Apple seems to be finally getting serious about infusing generative AI into its products — both internal and external — after announcing a solitary “Transformer” model-based autocorrect feature on iOS 17 earlier this year.
The company has shared several job opportunities listing out specific needs for generative AI in the last few weeks. For instance, a role on the App Store platform says that the company is “working on a generative-based developer experience platform for internal use and assist our app development team.”
Another job in the Apple Retail department mentions working on a “conversational AI platform (voice and chat)” to engage with customers. Apple’s job listing also notes tasks such as building text-generation tech such as “long-form text generation, summarization, question-answering.”
Some other job listings in AI/ML point towards working on fundamental models and list a “human-like conversational agent” as an example of applications that could be developed through it. The company has also posted requirements in departments like Siri Information Intelligence, a unit that handles features such as Siri and Spotlight search. Additionally, Apple is actively looking to work with people working on making models work locally on devices.
While Apple has posted listings looking for people working on generative AI before, this time around, the company has been more specific about its requirements.
Over the weekend, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple is set to invest over $1 billion per year in an effort to push generative AI-based products and features. The report quoted a person familiar with Apple’s developments saying that the company considered not shipping generative AI-based products “a pretty big miss internally.”
The company aims to tap into large language models (LLMs) to power features for Siri and Messages app — including things like sentence completion — for the next version of iOS, per Bloomberg. The report noted that Apple is exploring generative AI-aided features in apps and services like Xcode to help developers (the job listing above could be indicative of that), AI-generated playlists for Apple Music, and AI-assisted writing for Pages and Keynote.
There have been reports about Apple developing its own “Apple GPT,” but the company hasn’t really deployed anything for consumers yet. On the other hand, the Cupertino-based company’s rivals including Microsoft, Google, and Meta are deploying AI-powered features across hardware and software products.