Apple likely playing 'catch up' with AI trends, Citi says
Wachiwit
After it was reported that Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) had built an internal ChatGPT-style bot for its employees, investment firm Citi said the tech giant is likely playing "catch up" with trends in artificial intelligence.
"Based on Appleâs AI hiring efforts related to areas including Siri, Creativity Apps, Search, and secretive Special Project Group, we believe Apple is aiming to catch up with the AI trends across both infrastructure and applications," analyst Atif Malik wrote in an investor note. 
"We foresee Appleâs upcoming devices to further build on their predecessorsâ AI computing processing capabilities with advanced Siri and Gen AI based app tools to follow in first half of 2024."
Malik, who maintained his buy rating and $240 price target on Apple (AAPL), added that the tech giant started hiring for its machine learning and AI team in November 2019 but only ramped it up at the start of last year, before surging this year, leading him to believe the company is trying to catch up.
In addition, Malik said Apple (AAPL) is likely to take a hybrid approach with some large language model computation being done in the cloud and others that need higher latency and more privacy being done on the device, making Siri an "ideal spot" for the LLM. 
Qualcomm (QCOM) also recently announced it is bring on-device AI implementation via a partnership with Meta Platforms (META), but the issue Malik foresees with this approach is memory.
"LLMs require parameters to be constantly going back and forth from the RAM to the processor to predict the next token," Malik explained. "This subsequently requires parameters to be stored as close as possible to the processor (in the device most likely). For mobile devices, LLMs with parameters numbered in the 100B+ would take more memory space than desired or even possible." 
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