Bloomberg reports that Apple and other top technology companies have joined a new U.S. alliance to support the safe and responsible development and deployment of generative artificial intelligence, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced on Thursday. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said that Apple will join more than 200 members of the Artificial Intelligence Institute for Security Studies Consortium (AISIC) under the Department of Commerce, along with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google and Amazon.
"The U.S. government has an important role to play in setting the standards and developing the tools we need to reduce the risks of AI and harness its vast potential," Raimondo said in a statement. "The group will work with the department's National Institute of Standards and Technology on priority actions outlined in President Biden's executive order on artificial intelligence, including guidance on red teams, capability assessments, risk management, safeguards, and synthetic content watermarking."
Other tech companies, as well as civil society, academia, and state and local government officials, will also be involved to develop safety standards for regulating artificial intelligence.
Generative AI is generating excitement due to its potential to enhance creativity, increase efficiency, and drive technological advancement. However, concerns surrounding generative AI include ethical issues such as deepfakes, potential impacts on employment, information reliability issues, and challenges in ensuring privacy and effective regulation.
It is said that Apple spends millions of dollars every day on artificial intelligence research due to the large amount of hardware required to train large language models. According to a report, Apple will spend more than $4 billion on artificial intelligence servers by 2024.
Apple is said to be developing its own generative artificial intelligence model, "Ajax." Ajax is designed to be comparable to OpenAI's GPT-3 and GPT-4, and it can run on 200 billion parameters, demonstrating its high complexity and capabilities in language understanding and generation. Ajax, known internally as "AppleGPT," is designed to unify machine learning development across Apple and is indicative of Apple's broader strategy to integrate artificial intelligence more deeply into its ecosystem.
Some aspects of the model may be incorporated into iOS 18, such as an enhanced Siri with ChatGPT-like generative AI capabilities. Both The Information and analyst Jeff Pu claim that Apple will launch some kind of generative AI feature on iPhone and iPad later this year.