We don’t know that about Apple. Its major ChatGPT competitor is already publicly available on the internet – as an open-source project so that anyone can get started with it. You need to know this.
ChatGPT competitor of Apple
It has been no secret for some time that Apple is working on a competitor for the artificial intelligences ChatGPT and Dall-E. We recently heard rumors that Siri should get a major update this summer, with a lot of AI functions. Normally, Apple is very secretive about its software. Rarely anything leaks about a future iOS or macOS. But for its ChatGPT competitor, Apple has a different strategy.
Already in October, Apple published a large, multimodal language model called Ferret as open-source code. In other words, the basis for its ChatGPT competitor. This move went unnoticed for a long time, even by many members of the open source AI community. Ferret contains the complete code, but due to the lack of a commercial license it may only be used for research purposes. Still, it’s surprising that Apple shares the code so openly.
Ferret can do all this
Ferret has been published on the preprint server ArXiv. It can combine images and text and interpret them together. This means that Ferret can accurately describe and recognize where certain objects are located in an image.
A specially compiled dataset called GRIT was used for the training. The researchers emphasize that Ferret shows excellent results in classic reference and localization tasks and significantly outperforms existing models.
Also read: Apple GPT already exists – we know this from Apple’s own ChatGPT
Catching up via open source
The question arises why Apple chooses to put its ChatGPT competitor publicly on the internet. Bee iPhoned we have a theory about this. Apple has to catch up quite a bit to be able to compete with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. And at the moment the company does not have the necessary expertise to do it all itself.
Then, as a tech company, you can choose to hire a lot of people, or you can choose the route of volunteer work via open source. It is also not the first time that Apple has used the open-source community. For example, parts of macOS are open source, as is Apple’s programming language Swift.
Are you interested in Apple’s ChatGPT competitor? You can view its code via the ArXiv link below. And if you’re a little handy with programming, you might even be able to get a first impression of the new version of Siri. In any case, we would like to keep you informed via our newsletter.