Apple quietly releases new machine learning framework; Will it also join the AI war?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Yesterday, Google declared its big artificial intelligence (AI) ambitions after its DeepMind division unveiled the company's largest AI model Gemini, which is a multimodal foundation model, to the world. However, it wasn't the only tech company to make a big move towards AI. In order not to be left behind, Apple looks to have joined the AI war that is currently raging in Big Tech by releasing a new machine learning (ML) framework called MLX, but without much fanfare. Many reports are now suggesting that Apple can use this framework to build its own AI foundation models, something that was rumored earlier this year.

According to a report by The Verge, MLX is “a machine learning framework where developers can build models that run efficiently on Apple Silicon and deep learning model library MLX Data”. This is the biggest clue that this framework might be intended to develop its own AI models, although is unlikely to be a generative AI model, the likes of which have been released by Google, OpenAI, and others. Apple is pretty tight-lipped when speaking about the artificial intelligence features on its devices and refers to it as machine learning instead. Despite adding a few features for iPhones, such as Personal Voice, which is essentially based on AI algorithms, the company refrained from using those terms.

According to a report by Computerworld, MLX is not a tool intended for consumers but for its developers to get a powerful environment to train ML models. An interesting part of the report is that Apple has not forced any particular coding language for this framework, allowing developers to choose freely the language they want to, and it apparently invented powerful LLM tools in the process”.

An ML researcher working with