The reports revealing Apple’s “Ask” tool may not have been the whole story, with one leaker exclusively telling AppleInsider that the project goes beyond simple language learning models and generative AI tools.
Apple is working on developing AI tools
Sparse details emerged on February 23rd about a new tool called “Ask” being tested by Apple employees. Since then, we have received further information regarding this project.
The leaker contacted us late Sunday. Apple Insider Let’s learn a little more about Apple’s Ask tool. The leaker claims that Ask is “not LLM or any other generative AI as some people think.”
The leaker leans into this, saying that the support knowledge database and the front end of that database for support members is constantly evolving and needs to go far beyond that. They further state that this is intended to be an advanced natural language search engine to assist support users.
Despite spending all of Monday and a good portion of the night leading up to Tuesday trying to break through Apple’s wall of secrecy about the project, the source of the information apparently cannot be fully confirmed, and There was also no provision for asking amplifying questions. IP addresses can be faked, but at least they match the general physical location of Apple research facilities.
Efforts are ongoing to obtain more information about its core technology, which will obviously be added to a series of future OS releases. If we have more information on Tuesday or Wednesday, we will update this article accordingly.
What is Apple Ask?
Apple has launched a pilot program to provide selected AppleCare support advisors with an AI tool called Ask. This is a tool that automatically generates answers to your technical questions based on information from Apple’s internal databases.
Unlike simple search tools that return the same results every time based on relevance, the “Ask” program generates answers based on details mentioned in the query, such as device type and operating system. Advisors can mark these answers as “helpful” or “not helpful.”
Chatbots tend to make things up with high confidence, given that chatbots have recently started receiving feeds from other chatbots. This is called a “hallucination” and is clearly bad for his Apple employees who provide support to consumers.
The Ask tool attempts to avoid this behavior by being trained solely on an internal database with additional checks to ensure that answers are “factual, traceable, and useful.”
This leaked Ask tool is most likely the previously leaked Ajax tool or is based on it. This is an internal tool that some people allegedly called “AppleGPT.”
Tim Cook directly stated that Apple is working on AI tools that will likely be released at some point in 2024. Although nothing has been announced, the company is likely working on and testing a number of tools that rely on generative models similar to the way his ChatGPT works.
Apple’s AI efforts and what that means for iOS 18 are not yet clear. More details will be revealed at WWDC in June.
