Apple is currently in talks with prominent publishing houses seeking permission to use their content to train its generative AI model, reported The New York Times. The tech giant has reportedly proposed a multiyear $50 million deal to license the archives of news articles. Apple has reached out to news entities including Condé Nast, the publisher of Vogue and the New Yorker, along with NBC News and IAC, the owner of People, the Daily Beast, and Better Homes and Gardens.
As per the report, Apple is trying to catch up to the generative AI model bandwagon that allows users to create images and chat like a human being. The tech company has even developed its own internal ChatGPT-like service for its employees. It helps them test features, summarise text and answer questions based on saved data.
The report further stated, “Some of the publishers contacted by Apple were lukewarm on the overture. After years of on-again-off-again commercial deals with tech companies like Meta, the owner of Facebook, publishers have grown wary of jumping into business with Silicon Valley.”
While Apple is quite late to the party when it comes to LLM as compared to Google, Microsoft and Google, but it was earlier reported by The Information that it is investing millions of dollars into artificial intelligence. It was rumoured that the company is working on developing several AI models across different teams.
Going by The Information report, Apple is working on a conversational AI model called “Foundational Models”. This project has around 16 members including several Google engineers. This project is reportedly headed by John Giannandrea, Apple’s head of AI, who was hired in 2018 to improve Siri.
In addition to this, it was also rumoured that Apple’s Visual intelligence unit is developing an image generational model while another group is researching a multimodal AI that can recognise and process images, videos and text. As per the report, these models might help interact with customers better if integrated with AppleCare and make it easier to automate multistep commands with Siri.
