I don’t know it is clear that this is proof. Apple is notorious for keeping people out of the loop late I to a product’s lifecycle.

That’s not to say I think they’re making an equivalent, just that I doubt many of the employees looking to use ChatGPT would have access to their internal LLM even if it was excellent.

It might be good evidence that they won’t be announcing one at WWDC in a couple weeks, since I can imagine they might roll something like that out internally a couple of weeks before launch, but I wouldn’t bet on it.

When I worked at Apple they would have never rolled something out internally that they have yet to release. Sometimes they invite you to test something in a very controlled environment but they would not just give access outside of the controlled setting. Probably in person testing. Surrender your phone etc…

I had friends who worked on the initial iphone design, supply chain, software etc..

We would go to lunch fairly frequently - and jeasus those guys were all extremely honorable of their NDA/secrecy - it was impressive.

One of the guys moved to google and worked on some of their first mainboard designs - which was secret at the timew, and I only found out about it when I went to meet him for lunch and I saw a mainboard under his desk and said "ooh whats that!" he freaked out and we got out of there quick....

Some of the hardware at FB in ~2012/13 they designed was really awesome....

I always wonder what happens to these closed HW systems as they uplift/replace them over time. I am sure they are destroyed. Which sucks for many reasons.

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When we built Lucas' presidio campus and converged their DCs to that campus they through out tons of huge SGI boxes - and I was free to take some - but I didnt have any place to put it at the time - and I wish I would have figured that out more earnestly, as SGI always had beautiful cabinets.

If Apple is working on a ChatGPT equivalent, then they wouldn't release it internally to their 150,000 corporate employees first. Also, if they're working on a ChatGPT competitor, I highly doubt it would be near-ready considering how far behind they are in the generative AI space. The only reason Google released a competitor so quickly is because they were already working on it internally and were "forced" to share it publicly.

The same could be true of Apple. But they aren’t „forced“ to release it. Apple wouldn’t release a competitor on the Web, they would build it into macOS/iOS/whateverOS. We will know when the WWDC starts.

They’ve had Siri for years now. Massive amounts of data, ability to deploy at scale, real concerns about privacy.

I’d expect that Siri group had grown substantially recently and is having a lot of fun, building the next generation.

i sure hope so because Siri has gotten worse in the last 2 years, commands i used to use daily now fail saying it can't do that and then i try it on a different device, same prompt and it works. I do not understand why Siri works sometimes and just fails others. The HomePod Siri is especially bad now that I actually turned Siri off so my phone or watch would handle the request because they failed so often.

This is by design. All the tech giants realized search-by-speech is mostly unprofitable compared to search-by-type because you can't really sell ads auraly compared to visually. Every search done by speech is lost ad revenue. Expect to see less and less search by voice over the coming years

Something very weird is going on with the voice interfaces as I keep hearing this about each of the different assistants.

My experience is of Siri being, if anything, slightly better than a few years back; conversely, half the time Alexa would respond to me saying "Küche hundert prozent" with "Ich kann nicht Küche auf Spotify finden" and we don't even have Spotify.

From a user's perspective, they haven't shown much evidence of building new, competitive capabilities for years. Sometimes it feels like Siri has actually become less useful.

Unlikely. Apple management has been awful about this space in regards to Siri. Zero accountability at the Vp level. This should be a cakewalk for Apple, and yet here we are. Their implementation should be leveraging their hardware and Johny Srouji can implement enhancements to the neural engine & GPU to drive their LLM and establish a personal, privacy focused AI assistant.

People love to cite how "behind" Apple is in this space, but never say how. This is another variation of the oft-repeated mistake of lumping Apple in with "Big Tech" in all ways. Apple is not a gatekeeper to vast portions of the Internet the way Google and Amazon are. Nor is it obvious how Apple or its customers stand to benefit from generative "AI" at this point.

So, if anyone really thinks Apple is suffering from being "behind" in it, by all means expound on how. I'm genuinely interested.

It's not proof, but also I'm not sure where people are getting the idea that Apple is working on an LLM from.

They are not at all well positioned and have basically 0 expertise in this space.

Apple has a large AI group, including both the Siri team and the one designing the Inference hardware in the A/M series processors (the "Neural Engine"). And you can bet that there are a lot of AI people working in the heavily rumored auto group. None of those are directly LLM directed, but I don't know why you think that apple does not have any experience in this space.

I work in this space (language & sequence modeling) and I also know people who work in the self-driving space.

They have little expertise in language specifically. Relative to almost all other tech companies, they have a very small amount of the DL practicioner share.

Self driving is a completely orthogonal problem and Apple is mostly relying on classical techniques there, not DL. Hardware groups are not modeling groups.

as someone who worked at Apple, they have an incredibly strong culture of internal siloing. I would be zero surprised if they were building one but no one new about it