Apple stock pops on report it’s developing its own equivalent of ChatGPT

Apple stock popped briefly Wednesday after a report said the company was developing its own artificial intelligence large language model internally. It’s up about 1% for the day in midday trading.

The move signals Apple is taking recent advances in AI technology seriously and is considering integrating them into future products. The company rarely uses the term “artificial intelligence,” instead opting for the more academic “machine learning.”

For the past year, technologists and investors have been enamored of large language models, an AI technology that can turn out text or code that looks like a human wrote it.

Apple has an internal foundation for AI called Ajax and a small team of engineers have built a chatbot that some call “Apple GPT,” according to the report. Access to the chatbot is limited within Apple. Some Apple staffers believe the company is aiming for a significant AI announcement next year, according to the report.

Aside from LLMs, Apple uses a lot of machine learning in its products, from Siri speech recognition to the ability of the Photos app to detect faces and pets.

To some degree, Apple is late to jump aboard the LLM trend. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s ChatGPT into its software, Google has integrated its Bard into its search engine, Amazon will offer LLMs through AWS and Meta open-sourced a big LLM project this week.

On Tuesday, Qualcomm, which makes the processors for phones that compete with Apple’s iPhone, said it would work with Meta so its LLMs would work directly on Android devices, instead of on far-away servers in the cloud.

Apple representatives didn’t respond to CNBC’s request for comment.