Apple offers publishers millions to train AI on archives
Apple wants to license with content from news publishers to train generative AI systems, in multi-year deals to access content potentially valued to cost Apple tens of millions of dollars.
![Siri, Apple's main public-facing machine learning feature](https://photos5.appleinsider.com/gallery/57830-117782-54505-110094-Apple-Siri-xl-xl.jpg)
Siri, Apple's main public-facing machine learning feature
Apple is working on its own generative AI projects to maintain its position in the overall AI marketplace. To improve its work, those systems need content to learn from, something which Apple is allegedly trying to acquire.
According to sources of The New York Times on Friday, Apple has been in talks with a number of publishers, to secure access to their news archives. These allegedly include discussions of "multiyear deals worth at least $50 million" with major names in the publishing industry.
The list is said to include Conde Nast, the publisher of Vogue and The New Yorker among others. IAC, the organization behind People, Better Homes, and The Daily Beast, has also talked to Apple, as has NBC News.
While the talks could be lucrative for the publishers, the response has supposedly been mixed. Some executives were happy with the idea, especially since Apple asked for permission and offered to pay for access instead of scraping content.
In some instances, publishers were worried about potential legal issues that could arise from having their archives fed into a generative AI system. There is also trepidation over the possibility Apple's access could lead to the iPhone maker competing against the publishers in the future, and that Apple was "vague" about its future plans for the content beyond AI training.
Apple's attempts to keep up with the rest of the AI field has seen some surprising success. It has already implemented a lot of machine learning elements in iOS and other platforms, and on December 19, it published a paper on rapidly creating 3D avatars of humans from brief video clips.
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Also, having to rely on third parties will only slow them down. There are claims that regulations will be passed which may hinder companies such as Google which is scraping the internet for data, I assure you nothing like that will happen in the states. Currently, the world is in a race and no country can afford to be behind, no government (barring EU, duh) is foolish enough to hinder this fledgling field.
Also, Apple is a hardware company unlike Google which is a true software company, they have more areas to integrate and monetise AI.
Apple isn't a "true" software company is what respect? Because they also design HW?
Isn't Apple more akin to Samsung which sells hardware, and makes software to go along with that? Whereas, Google focuses on software and also has divisions such as Google Deepmind which is the leader of AI research, also possessing the world's fastest quantum computer.
While services may be growing, the iPhone and hardware is, and will remain, the cash cow for the foreseeable future.
Conversely, Google is financially dependant on software services products, and not so much, hardware.
Those services are not limited to the CE realm as they reach into science and industry too.
Apple's scope hasn't reached those areas.
As of September 2023 Google has $119.93 B of cash on hand and Apple has $61.55 B.
That’s like me saying Google isn’t a true software company because their business is advertising.
lol citation needed. 3 years ago Apple had almost $2B cash on hand:
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/04/30/apple-q2-2020-cash-hoard-heres-how-much-apple-has-on-hand.html
Creating 3D avatars probably isn't significant in terms of 'keeping up' and its ML efforts have consistently seemed to get marketing attention after industry has already moved ahead from them.
It was only really this year that ML got any major attention (WWDC2023) . It's been around on its phones since 2017 but until this year not much was really pushed and that's because up to recently perhaps it just wasn't being used as much as it was on competing phones.
It was the balance between the two in terms of revenue.
Also, StrangeDays is on point by calling Google just an ad placement company if we go by your facile definition. Personally, I see Apple as being a very deep in SW and HW development, just as I see this with Google, MS, FB, and many others.
He missed the point entirely and your point boils down to your definition of 'true' which completely ignores what the OP might have meant and, IMO at least, seems very clear.
Apple's bread and butter remains hardware.
Google's bread and butter remains software.
Even though both of them produce hardware and software.
Steve Jobs - Apple Is Software - YouTube
Apple is far beyond Google/Microsoft in software/hardware design when it comes to creating new frontiers and that will be put on display again next in 2024.
Google has decades worth of data and their deepmind division is the leader in AI research. The only reason they were behind OpenAI is because they were caught by surprise and are quickly catching up.
Also, if content creators start charging money then only Apple, Google and Microsoft will be able to pay which will automatically kill all other competition.I don't really want that to happen.