Amber Neely
With ChatGPT growing ever more popular, Apple has reportedly decided to step up its game and focus on natural-language search processing.
In February, Apple held its annual AI summit, an internal event that briefs employees on its Machine Learning and AI advancements.
The event was somewhat more subdued than expected and was most noteworthy for being the first in-person event that Apple had held in years.
However, the New York Times spoke to those familiar with the event, which seemingly offered more insight. According to the sources, engineers — including those said to be from Apple's Siri team — are actively testing language-generating concepts.
Generative language would be a massive undertaking for Apple. Currently, Siri needs to be fed a prompt that already exists inside its database. So, if a user asks Siri a question that hasn't already been integrated into its code, it responds that it cannot help the user.
John Burkey, a former Apple engineer, told the New York Times that upgrading Siri's data set required engineers to rebuild the entire database — a task that could take up to six weeks. He believes that adding more complex features could take a year and doesn't believe that Siri would ever become a creative assistant like ChatGPT.
More broadly, the New York Times discusses how tech companies are now expected to keep up with ChatGPT, with major players like Google, Amazon, and Microsoft rushing to integrate chatbot features into their products.
Microsoft has already begun testing its ChatGPT features, which have been integrated into its Bing & Edge products.
Google is bringing AI tools to users in Google Workspace and opening up its AI language model called PaLM for developers and businesses.
It's unlikely that generative language is going away anytime soon. On Tuesday, OpenAI released GPT-4, an upgraded language model for ChatGPT that is more accurate than its predecessors.
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
AppleInsider Staff
Chip Loder
Malcolm Owen
16 Comments
Goodness, I hope they do something, because Siri sucks in it's current form. Half the time or more it just does a glorified Google search or your question and tells you to look at your web page. Not very convenient when you are multi-tasking. I want a computer "assistant" that is working on being more like the computer on a Star Ship, not a Google assistant. ;-)
It's more than just Siri being stupid (technologically inept, mishearing me, etc.). The bigger problem is that Apple deliberately dummies it down out of fears it may cause trouble for the user. For example, I can't tell Siri to change settings on my iPhone, which makes me far, FAR more angry than Siri mishearing me a making a mistake. The entire purpose of Siri is to have it do things for me because my hands are busy doing something else. So when it tells me it can't do that, I know it's due to a stupid limitation imposed by Apple.
What this means is, even if Apple replaced Siri with ChatGPT, so long as the ridiculous limitations are still imposed, it would be just as frustrating to use as it is now. I want the power to command Siri to do just about anything I myself can do on my iPhone, iPad or Mac. That includes changing settings. Anything less is a vastly inferior product that I will almost never use and will complain about until the end of time in forums like this one.
Apple, the ball is in your court.
I tried out Bing and ChatGPT today with the same question. I knew the answer but wanted it written for me concisely to pass on to a friend asking me this. What are the MP count and dimensions of an APS-C image taken on a Sony A7IV? ChatGPT nailed it on one with all the details and explanation, exactly what I needed. Bing (this is the new Bing chat mode using Edge) got the MP count correct but then said it couldn't find the answer to the dimensions in its search. I could not resist telling Bing that ChatGPT knew all the answers to this question; Bing replied, 'Sorry to disappoint you."