Dive Brief:
- Apple is set to join nonprofit organization the Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society, according to Bloomberg.
- Founded last September, the Partnership includes other tech giants — and Apple competitors — like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon and IBM and aims to better educate consumers on the benefits of the technology, along with establishing standards and best practices for AI at the industry level.
- Bloomberg reports that Apple’s announcement of joining the partnership could happen as soon as this week, although neither group commented on the impending news.
Dive Insight:
Long before terms like “virtual assistant” or “chatbot” were hot in the mobile industry, Apple had already integrated Siri onto its smartphones, becoming an early leader in the consumer-facing AI space. However, Siri’s star seems to have faded since its bright debut in 2011, with offerings like Amazon’s Alexa appearing more robust and intelligent.
A move to join the recently-formed Partnership on AI shows Apple is actively interested in improving its AI offerings, through Siri technology and beyond, and potentially regaining its foothold in the emerging mobile technologies space. Apple is also notorious for being cagey about sharing its internal research and development, as Bloomberg notes, something that’s kept many developers away.
However, the company might slowly be becoming more collaborative to better understand bleeding edge tech like AI. Artificial intelligence stands to transform the marketing industry, but many consumers remain wary of tools like chatbots and many businesses are not confident how to properly develop or implement them, either. The Partnership on AI to Benefit People and Society aims to address these hurdles.
“Together, the organization’s members will conduct research, recommend best practices, and publish research under an open license in areas such as ethics, fairness and inclusivity; transparency, privacy, and interoperability; collaboration between people and AI systems; and the trustworthiness, reliability and robustness of the technology,” said the announcement of the Partnership.
