Apple Joins US Commerce Department’s AI Safety Institute Consortium

Apple and other top tech companies have joined a new U.S. consortium to support the safe and responsible development and deployment of generative AI, the Commerce Department announced on Thursday (via Bloomberg).

Apple, along with OpenAI, Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon, will join more than 200 members of the AI Safety Institute Consortium (AISIC) under the department, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said.

“The U.S. government has a significant role to play in setting the standards and developing the tools we need to mitigate the risks and harness the immense potential of artificial intelligence,” Raimondo said in a statement.

The group will work with the department’s National Institute of Standards and Technology on priority actions outlined in President Biden’s AI executive order, “including developing guidelines for red-teaming, capability evaluations, risk management, safety and security, and watermarking synthetic content.”

Other technology companies, as well as civil society groups, academics, and state and local government officials, will also be involved to establish safety standards regarding AI regulation.

Generative AI has spurred excitement due to its potential to enhance creativity, improve efficiency, and advance technology. However, fears surrounding generative AI include ethical concerns like deepfakes, the potential impact on jobs, issues around information reliability, and challenges in ensuring privacy and effective regulation.

Apple is said to be spending millions of dollars a day on AI research as training large language models requires a lot of hardware. Apple is on track to spend more than $4 billion on AI servers in 2024, according to one report.

Apple is said to be developing its own generative AI model called “Ajax”. Designed to rival the likes of OpenAI’s GPT-3 and GPT-4, Ajax operates on 200 billion parameters, suggesting a high level of complexity and capability in language understanding and generation. Internally known as “Apple GPT,” Ajax aims to unify machine learning development across Apple, suggesting a broader strategy to integrate AI more deeply into Apple’s ecosystem.

Aspects of the model could be incorporated into iOS 18, such as an enhanced version of Siri with ChatGPT-like generative AI functionality. Both The Information and analyst Jeff Pu claim that Apple will have some kind of generative AI feature available on the ‌iPhone‌ and iPad later this year.