Apple plans to share its grand AI plans with the public later this year, CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s recent annual shareholder meeting. Cook has been fairly vocal about the potential of AI, especially generative AI, even if Apple on the whole has maintained a staunch silence on it while rivals Google and Microsoft (and now Samsung) move to outpace it with consumer-facing products and use cases.
According to a Reuters report, the Apple CEO has reiterated to investors that the company sees “incredible breakthrough potential for generative AI, which is why we’re currently investing significantly in this area,” adding that “we believe that will unlock transformative opportunities for users when it comes to productivity, problem solving and more.”
As for how Apple plans to harness it within its own products like iPhone and services, more details will be revealed later this year. Cook has emphasised that artificial intelligence is already at work in current Apple devices, like for instance “Every Mac that is powered by Apple silicon is an extraordinarily capable AI machine. In fact, there’s no better computer for AI on the market today”, but the company is also working on bringing more explicit features to seemingly realise the full potential of industry’s most viral trend.
Some of them could be centred around Siri. Online reports suggest that Apple is prepping a bunch of generative AI “superpowers” for its virtual assistant, as it rushes to catch up with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini (previously Bard). The first set of announcements could arrive as early as in June at WWDC 2024.
Siri hasn’t been the “smart” AI assistant that iPhone users expect compared to rivals from Google and even Amazon. Apple’s strict privacy rules keep data locked on the device, limiting the AI’s learning potential. But the company seems to have cracked the code on integrating a powerful large language model called Ajax into Siri even with those limitations. In theory, this means, it could soon be possible to run powerful AI models, like the ones behind ChatGPT, on the iPhone.
Apple has been sharing AI tech, like the open-source Ferret model which can juggle different types of data like OpenAI’s GPT-4 even as tools like MLX for MacBooks powered by its homegrown silicon, are paving the way for AI tools to work much more seamlessly on them. Rumours suggest upgraded iPhone microphones are also in the works that could greatly enhance Siri’s hearing abilities while on-device breakthroughs such as AI models being able to tap into the iPhone’s flash memory, where apps and data are stored, could entail lightning fast responses.
Follow FE Tech Bytes on Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook.
