Apple enters GenAI marketplace

Apple has joined Google and Microsoft in launching its own generative artificial intelligence (AI) offering, OpenELM. Apple claims that OpenELM, “a state-of-the-art open language model,” will offer users more accurate and less misleading results than its widely criticized competitors.

“OpenELM uses a layer-wise scaling strategy to efficiently allocate parameters within each layer of the transformer model, leading to enhanced accuracy,” says Apple.

Apple claims that OpenELM exhibits a 2.36 percent improvement in accuracy compared to its initial predecessor OLMo, while requiring half as many pre-training tokens. So far, Apple has delayed offering modern AI capabilities on its devices, but it is expected that the next version of its operating systems will need to include some unique AI features. The launch of iOS 18 is scheduled for June 10.

But Apple’s belated entry into AI technology may come to be seen as another case of the smartphone giant once again offering consumers too little too late. After all, Microsoft-backed ChatGPT launched at the end of 2022, and Apple also faces competition from Google Gemini, a rebrand of Google Bard, the search giant’s first attempt at creating a large language model (LLM) like ChatGPT.

Silicon Valley’s smartphone giant lost its lead in the global smartphone market at the beginning of 2024. Sales of Apple’s luxury-end iPhone dropped by roughly 10 percent, with Samsung regaining the top slot in the first quarter of the year. Apple sales were also adversely impacted by the rapid growth of Chinese rivals such as Xiaomi, sales of which surged 34 percent, reaping a 14 percent market share, coinciding with the Beijing-based electronics group’s launch of its new electric cars.

Nor is the market for AI services proving as fertile as the tech giants had first assumed. Google Gemini’s recent teething problems are a prime example. The market value of Google’s parent company. Alphabet, fell by over $70 billion in the first day after the launch of its AI-driven chatbot Gemini. In a ludicrous parody of Silicon Valley’s identity politics, the chatbot bizarrely inserted people of color into leading roles in AI-generated images of real historical events, such as the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Early on, Microsoft-backed ChatGPT also developed an unenviable reputation for making up facts to support whatever argument it was presenting. This is a process the IT industry likes to refer to as “hallucinating,” presumably to make it sound more glamorous than labeling the flawed chatbots merely ‘inaccurate.’

The first major real-world use for generative AI was initially seen among cybercriminals, who lost little time in weaponizing the new technology. According to cybersecurity firm Group-IB’s Hi-Tech Crime Trends Report 2023/2024, between June and October of 2023, over 130,000 unique hosts with access to OpenAI were compromised, representing a 36 percent rise over the first five months of the year. Open AI, the maker of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT, then scored another own goal with the unveiling of its new Voice Engine, billed as “a model for creating custom voices.” This has also rapidly been seized on by cybercriminals to create ‘deepfake’ voices mimicking those of top executives to execute financial fraud.

There has, therefore, already been a considerable corporate backlash against the use of generative AI. In August, research from BlackBerry revealed that 75 percent of organizations worldwide were either implementing bans or considering doing so. Even worse news for services such as Microsoft-backed ChatGPT is that 61% of the 2,000 IT decision-makers in the US, UK, Canada, France, Germany, Australia, and Japan said that they intended the ban to become long-term or permanent. The main reasons quoted for doing so are concerns regarding data security (67 percent) and potential reputational damage (57 percent).

Given this bleak roadmap for any new AI-driven services, it remains to be seen where its latecomer generative AI offering will be sufficient to recoup Apple’s failing fortunes in the seeming absence of any truly innovative offering in recent years.