Skip to main content

Apple has been secretly working on a ChatGPT rival for years

Apple CEO Tim Cook has just revealed that the company has been working on generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools “for years.” The surprise announcement suggests that Apple could launch a ChatGPT rival — supposedly dubbed “Apple GPT” — sooner than anyone expected.

The announcement was made in an interview with Reuters following Apple’s third-quarter earnings report. Cook explained that higher research and development (R&D) spending at the company had been driven in part by an increased focus on generative AI.

An iPhone on a table with the Siri activation animation playing on the screen.
Omid Armin / Unsplash

“We’ve been doing research across a wide range of AI technologies, including generative AI, for years,” Cook said. “We’re going to continue investing and innovating and responsibly advancing our products with these technologies to help enrich people’s lives. Obviously, we’re investing a lot, and it is showing up in the R&D spending that you’re looking at.”

Recommended Videos

It’s a remarkably frank admission for a company that likes to keep its cards close to its chest. It’s exceedingly unusual for Apple to discuss its future plans, especially in an area like generative AI that could be ripe with lucrative opportunities.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

Apple GPT coming soon?

A MacBook Pro on a desk with ChatGPT's website showing on its display.
Hatice Baran / Unsplash

Aside from the rarity of Cook’s comments, they also bring up another interesting point: they could signal that Apple is gearing up to make a major declaration regarding generative AI.

That certainly chimes with comments made by Bloomberg journalist Mark Gurman just a couple of weeks ago. Gurman explained that Apple is developing an “Apple GPT” chatbot that could be revealed in a “significant AI-related announcement” as soon as next year.

The fact that Apple has been working on generative AI for years — and that Tim Cook feels now is the right time to unveil the news to the world — suggests that Apple GPT could be at an advanced stage of development. After all, Apple won’t want to keep the world waiting after making such a notable admission.

At the same time, it ramps up the pressure on Apple, now that the cat is out of the bag. There have been concerns that the company could be late to the AI party, and at least one respected analyst has said the company is years behind rivals like ChatGPT.

But with Tim Cook saying Apple has years of research backing up its generative AI efforts, Apple fans will be hoping that the product lives up to the hype. We might not have long to wait before we find out.

Alex Blake
Alex Blake has been working with Digital Trends since 2019, where he spends most of his time writing about Mac computers…
DeepSeek: everything you need to know about the AI that dethroned ChatGPT
robot hand in point space

A year-old startup out of China is taking the AI industry by storm after releasing a chatbot which rivals the performance of ChatGPT while using a fraction of the power, cooling, and training expense of what OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic's systems demand. Here's everything you need to know about Deepseek's V3 and R1 models and why the company could fundamentally upend America's AI ambitions.
What is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek (technically, "Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd.") is a Chinese AI startup that was originally founded as an AI lab for its parent company, High-Flyer, in April, 2023. That May, DeepSeek was spun off into its own company (with High-Flyer remaining on as an investor) and also released its DeepSeek-V2 model. V2 offered performance on par with other leading Chinese AI firms, such as ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu, but at a much lower operating cost.

The company followed up with the release of V3 in December 2024. V3 is a 671 billion-parameter model that reportedly took less than 2 months to train. What's more, according to a recent analysis from Jeffries, DeepSeek's “training cost of only US$5.6m (assuming $2/H800 hour rental cost). That is less than 10% of the cost of Meta’s Llama.” That's a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions to billions of dollars that US firms like Google, Microsoft, xAI, and OpenAI have spent training their models.

Read more
OpenAI’s big, new Operator AI already has problems
OpenAI logo on a white board

OpenAI has announced its AI agent tool, called Operator, as a research preview as of Thursday, but the launch isn’t without its minor hiccups.

The artificial intelligence brand showcased features of the new tool in an online demo, explaining that Operator is a Computer Using Agent (CUA) based on the GPT-4o model, which enables multi-modal functions, such as the ability to search the web and being able to understand the reasoning of the search results.

Read more
Perplexity’s new AI agent can perform multi-step tasks on your Android device
Running Perplexity on OnePlus Pad 2.

Perplexity announced Thursday that it is beginning to roll out an agentic AI for Android devices, called Perplexity Assistant, which will be able to independently take multi-step actions on behalf of its user.

"We are excited to launch the Perplexity Assistant to all Android users," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote in a post to X on Thursday. "This marks the transition for Perplexity from an answer engine to a natively integrated assistant that can call other apps and perform basic tasks for you."

Read more