• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 22, 2023

Apple reportedly has begun negotiations with major news publishers over permission to use their content as the technology company develops its own generative artificial intelligence (GAI) platforms.

The iPhone maker wants to secure multiyear deals worth at least $50 million to license the archives of news articles, according to the report, which cited people familiar with the discussions.

Contracts would include Condé Nast, publisher of The New Yorker; NBC News; and IAC, which owns People, The New York Times reported.

Apple CEO Tim Cook during the company's latest earnings call with investors said certain technology developments at the company “would not be possible without AI.” He pointed to the latest iOS 17 features like Personal Voice and Live Voicemail, also confirming that Apple was working on generative AI technologies.

In July, Bloomberg reported that Apple had developed and built its own framework to create large language models (LLMs), the same type of technology that support AI-based systems like OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google Bard.

Apple's engineers call its chatbot service Apple GPT, which has been trained on more than 200 billion parameters. It has a foundation in Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX), a web development technique for more responsive applications and websites.

To make this news more convincing, during News Corp.’s November earnings call, CEO Robert Thomson said the company was in "advanced discussions with a range of digital companies that we anticipate will bring significant revenue in return for the use of our unmatched content sets."

Thomson said GAI engines are only as sophisticated as their inputs and need constant replenishing to remain relevant.

"We are proud to partner with responsible purveyors of AI products and their prescient leaders,” Thomson said.

Big companies have been investing aggressively to integrate GAI, while companies like Amazon, Apple, Google, Microsoft have been working to combine the technology into their respective platforms. 

Similar to Google and Microsoft, which have built small or nano multimodal AI models, Apple wants to embed and run those models locally in devices such as the iPhone. The company already has embedded AI in iOS and macOS, as well as used the technology to improve camera quality.

Apple has poured millions into AI development and reportedly is on track to spend $1 billion annually to catch up with other companies. Its research now includes a team focused on AI to help solve unspecified large-scale problems.

Several teams, in fact, support Apple's AI efforts. Some include generative models, temporal learning, multimodal input streams, deep reinforcement learning, inverse reinforcement learning, decision theory, and game theory. This team dives deep into deep learning and AI research to help solve real-world, large-scale problems.

Recent job openings tell the story of how the company uses machine learning engineers and developers experienced in AI for software and services, as well as machine learning engineers for IS&T enterprise systems. A research paper shows the direction the company will take the technology.