Apple tests a ‘chatbot’ for internal use and works on AI tools, according to Bloomberg

July 20 (Portaltic/EP) –

Manzana is developing Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools and, more specifically, a ‘chatbot’, which would initially be intended for internal use, with which it hopes to challenge other companies dedicated to this technology, such as OpenAI and Google.

The iPhone maker has raised a large language model (LLM) development framework in a project internally known as Ajax, Apple-related sources have confirmed to Bloomberg.

The journalist Mark Gurman, who is usually correct in his advances on the technology company, has qualified that there are several teams that are collaborating on the project and that those in charge of moving it forward they aim to address privacy concerns.

Gurman also recalled that, although Apple “has included AI functions in products for years”, with the arrival of ChatGPT, developed by OpenAI, Google Bard and Microsoft’s Bing “it’s catching up in the generative tools market.”

With this, he has indicated that in this boom in the interest of large companies in generative AI, the American manufacturer “has been conspicuously absent” and that its main solution related to this technology, Siri, “It has stagnated in recent years.”

However, he stressed that Apple -which considers that there is still a great deal pending “a lot of problems to solve” around this technology, in the words of the CEO himself, Tim Cook- that “has managed to advance AI in other areas”, including improvements in the photography section and search on the iPhone.

Despite these advances, the company is looking to lay the groundwork for AI services with Ajax, which is being used to build LLM, as well as a tool similar to ChatGPT for internal use.

This ‘chatbot’ application would have been created as an experiment at the end of last year and would be in the hands of a group of engineers. Its implementation within Apple “was initially halted for security concerns about generative AI,” according to Gurman, but it has reached more employees for its tests.

At the moment, it is known that the company is using this tool to create prototypes of the products and that it can also be used to summarize texts and answer questions in based on the data with which it has been trained.

These sources consulted by Bloomberg have also insisted that Apple’s work is not far from Google’s with Bard, OpenAI with ChatGPT or Microsoft with Bing and that its ‘chatbot “does not include any novel technology.”