Apple restricts employees from using ChatGPT for fear of leaking company secrets

According to internal sources and company documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, Apple has restricted employees from using artificial intelligence encoding tools such as ChatGPT and GitHubCopilot due to concerns about leaking confidential data to external sources. According to reports, Apple is also developing similar artificial intelligence technologies.

ChatGPT is a Large Conversation Language Model (LLM) developed by OpenAI supported by Microsoft, capable of completing various tasks from answering questions, writing papers, to assisting in programming. Currently, the ChatGPT artificial intelligence model only runs on OpenAI or Microsoft servers and can be accessed through the internet.

Apple has decided to restrict the use of external artificial intelligence tools because these models will send user data back to developers for cloud processing, which may expose confidential company data. OpenAI previously faced privacy issues with ChatGPT due to a bug that allowed users to access other users' chat history. In response to criticism from the Italian authorities, OpenAI has provided users with the option to turn off chat history.

To address corporate privacy concerns, Microsoft recently announced plans to launch a privacy focused version of ChatGPT, which will target banks, healthcare providers, and other large organizations with significant needs for data leakage and regulatory compliance.

This more expensive commercial version of ChatGPT will run on dedicated servers, separate from servers used by other companies or individual users, which will help prevent data leakage and prevent sensitive data from being used to train artificial intelligence language models. Even so, it is questionable whether well-known competitors like Apple will trust Microsoft's confidential data.

Apple is developing its own big language model under the leadership of John Giannandrea, a former Google employee and currently Apple's Senior Vice President for Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Strategy. It should be noted that although Apple restricts its employees from using ChatGPT, this ban does not apply to Apple users. Just yesterday, OpenAI released an official ChatGPT client for iPhone users in the United States, who can now easily access ChatGPT on their iPhones through their OpenAI account.