Apple appears to finally be getting serious about incorporating generative AI into its products, having announced its “Transformer” model-based auto-correction feature separately in iOS 17 earlier this year.
The company has published several job postings in recent weeks that list specific needs for generative AI. For example, a job posting for its App Store platform says the company is “working on a generative AI-based developer experience platform for internal use to support app development teams.”
Another job at Apple's retail division describes working on a “conversational AI platform (voice and chat)” to interact with customers. The Apple job listing also lists tasks such as building text generation technology for “long-form text generation, summarization, and question answering.”
Other AI/ML job postings focus on developing foundational models, citing “human-like conversational agents” as an example of applications that can be developed through them. The company is also looking to hire for divisions such as Siri Information Intelligence, which handles features like Siri and Spotlight search. Additionally, Apple is actively seeking collaborations with people working on making models run locally on devices.
Apple has posted job listings for generative AI roles before, but this time it's more specific about the requirements.
Over the weekend, Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reported that Apple plans to invest more than $1 billion a year to advance generative AI-based products and features. The report quoted a person familiar with Apple's developments as saying that the company considered not shipping generative AI-based products “a pretty big failure internally.”
According to Bloomberg, the company is looking to use large language models (LLMs) to enhance Siri and Messages features (such as sentence completion) for the next iOS. The report also notes that Apple is considering AI-powered generation features in apps and services like Xcode to help developers (as the job ad above may suggest), AI-generated playlists for Apple Music, and AI-assisted writing for Pages and Keynote.
There have been reports that Apple is developing its own “Apple GPT,” but the company hasn't rolled anything out to consumers yet. Meanwhile, the Cupertino-based rivals, including Microsoft, Google and Meta, are rolling out AI-powered features across their hardware and software products.
