Apple appears to be putting its money where its mouth is with artificial intelligence. According to a new report, the company has floated offers worth $50 million in licensing multiyear agreements with news publishers in order to train its AI models.
Top comment by John Atkinson
I’m still not completely sold on AI but I’m glad Apple is at least getting permission for training data rather than just stealing it from other creatives like some companies have clearly done. It’s very likely that this data is just going to be a starting base and crowdsourcing data will likely be one of the options in Analytics and Improvements that can be turned on/off in privacy settings. Considering the concern about crowdsourcing data I think it will get an opt in screen during setup similar to sharing Siri recordings.
The only thing I’m wondering is how much will be on device and how much will be on the cloud. I wouldn’t be surprised if the XS and 11 would have to go cloud only as they’re the oldest devices supported but I wonder where the local support would be cut off, like is it 12 & up or 14 Pro & up or just the 15 Pro line or maybe only next years 16 Pro. Considering their low memory AI papers I doubt it’d be exclusively cloud but I doubt it’d come to all devices.
The New York Times has the scoop:
Apple has opened negotiations in recent weeks with major news and publishing organizations, seeking permission to use their material in the company’s development of generative artificial intelligence systems, according to four people familiar with the discussions.
The technology giant has floated multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles, said the people with knowledge of talks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive negotiations. The news organizations contacted by Apple include Condé Nast, publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The Daily Beast and Better Homes and Gardens.
It’s unclear how successful Apple has been at actually securing licenses to publisher archives, however. The report notes that some “publishers contacted by Apple were lukewarm on the overture.”
Apple has been mostly quiet in the AI space while OpenAI, Google, and other tech firms develop generative AI tools in real time. Instead, Apple has only pointed to overhauled autocorrect in iOS 17 as using a transformer model.
Meanwhile, Mark Gurman has continuously reported on an internally used “Apple GPT” chatbot that the company has been building for itself. Actual customer-facing features based on Apple’s generative AI model could be planned for the upcoming year.
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