Apple has been paying attention to the rise of ChatGPT, Google Bard and other similar tools: so far this month the company has posted 28 job opportunities in the field of AI, which gives us a clear indication that Apple is ready to invest in this technology.
As spotted by 9to5Mac, one of the listings is for a Visual Generative Modeling Research Engineer. The role will be part of "a group that will shape the way generative AI technologies transform Apple's mobile computing platforms", the description says.
That sounds fairly ambitious to us. It's not clear exactly what these roles mean for users, but the number of roles that are now open and the language used in their descriptions would point to Apple taking generative AI very seriously.
AI with everything
There's plenty of artificial intelligence embedded into Apple products already of course – whether it's finding photos of your cat or recognizing Siri voice commands – but this seems likely to be on a whole new level in terms of what it's capable of.
Recent reports suggest that Apple knows it's falling behind the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft and Google in the AI race, and we've already written about the response that's needed from Apple if it wants to compete in this particular area.
Apple CEO Tim Cook is on record as saying that recent advances in generative AI are "very interesting" but has also said that Apple is going to be "deliberate and thoughtful" in its approach to the technology – so watch this space.
Analysis: apply here
You can search for AI-related jobs at Apple yourself, and you can see they cover a whole host of different teams and job titles. As you would expect, you need a lot of talent, experience and passion to meet the requirements for one of these posts.
The language is different across the various listings, but we've spotted references to " the next generation of natural language understanding capability of Siri" and "the pivotal shift of AI technologies that is leading the revolution in human-computer interaction".
That's the sort of language that makes us think Apple is taking generative AI very seriously. Whether or not Siri will morph into a ChatGPT-style bot remains to be seen, but it's one of the possibilities that this latest batch of job listings point to.
Apple knows that if it doesn't move fast on AI, someone else will. OpenAI just launched ChatGPT for iOS, while there are numerous other third-party tools that can bring top-tier artificial intelligence tools to your Apple products right now. Or, you can use iOS Shortcuts to enhance Siri with ChatGPT.
