Apple Is Looking for Talent for Its AI Team. What Do They Have in the Works, and Will Your Business Be Able to Use It Soon?

Apple Wants a Strong Generative A.I. Team

Tech Crunch reported that Apple is looking to expand its A.I. resources, specifically by looking for developers with the expertise required to create generative A.I.

Generative A.I. is the kind of A.I. that creates content like text, images, audio, and even video based on a prompt given to it. Perhaps the most famous example of generative A.I. is ChatGPT.

So, what is Apple up to here? Is it creating a ChatGPT rival, and will it be available anytime soon?

The answer is: It’s complicated.

It is complicated because Apple has a long history of being comfortable not being first.

Apple Has a History of Waiting at the Sidelines for a While

Apple is a company that is almost synonymous with innovation in many people’s minds, but the truth is that this is a company that is really talented at identifying how to create the best version of other company’s products.

Think of how long the portable Walkman was on the market before Apple unleashed the iPod.

Or consider that cell phones went all the way back to the 1980s, when Apple was designing its Mac desktop computers. But in 2007, after decades of having no product in the cell phone market, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone, which more or less destroyed flip phones.

If the company has a motto that owes to its world dominance, it would probably be: “It’s not about who does it first, but who does it best.”

Is Apple Creating Siri 2.0? Siri vs. IBM Watson Is Up Next.

It is certainly likely that Apple will take a page out of IBM’s book. IBM, in case you missed it, recently announced that it will be upgrading and expanding its long-running IBM Watson A.I. services to Watsonx, a next-level B2B A.I. suite of automated services.

Whether this generative A.I. will be writing texts for you, or editing or even creating images on your iPhone, is unknown.

An educated guess would suggest that Apple will be less interested in B2B A.I. (which is IBM’s specialty), and be more focused on individual users of their products like the iPhone and Apple Watch.

Will Your Business Be Using Apple’s Generative A.I. Anytime Soon?

That answer of course depends on how great Apple’s A.I. team becomes, and how quickly it is willing to develop and release the product(s).

Some companies, like Google and Microsoft, are more than comfortable allowing users to beta-test their products to gain deeper insights into how to improve them for the “official” launch.

You could make the argument that the very reason for ChatGPT’s current availability is that it is not only free advertising for Microsoft, which has the majority stake in ChatGPT developer OpenAI, but it also offers developers free ongoing feedback from users all over the world.

It would probably be out of character for Apple to do such a thing. It tends to “perfect” a product in the shadows, release it at full price, let consumers use the product for, say, a year, and then create a new-and-improved product that is available, at full price, within the next year.

If you look at the long lineage of iPhone upgrades over the years, you will see that Apple is eager to work on a hit product pretty much constantly, but is reticent to release a new product until they are pretty much sure it has potential to be a hit product.