The previous few months have seen a surge in synthetic intelligence (AI) chatbots like ChatGPT, adopted by high-profile bulletins from tech giants like Microsoft and Google on how they plan to combine this type of AI expertise into their very own merchandise.
Within the midst of all this enthusiasm, Apple has been comparatively quiet, main some to imagine that generative AI expertise isn’t a precedence for the iPhone maker — and that it could even be lagging behind its rivals.
Nonetheless, those that know the way Apple rolls aren’t satisfied that’s the case. Apple isn’t an organization to make daring proclamations about what it’s engaged on; as a substitute, it all the time waits till it has a tangible product to indicate us.
In case you weren’t positive, although, Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner dispelled the parable that Apple isn’t engaged on generative AI in an interview with Reuters at this time on the heels of the corporate’s quarterly earnings name.
Apple’s monetary statements reveal that the corporate has spent a whopping $22.61 billion on analysis and growth on this fiscal yr alone. That’s $3.12 billion greater than it had spent by the identical time final yr. Prepare dinner suggests {that a} good chunk of that’s being spent on generative AI analysis — and that’s not even a brand new initiative.
We’ve been doing analysis throughout a variety of AI applied sciences, together with generative AI, for years. We’re going to proceed investing and innovating and responsibly advancing our merchandise with these applied sciences to assist enrich folks’s lives. Clearly, we’re investing quite a bit, and it’s exhibiting up within the R&D spending that you simply’re .Tim Prepare dinner
Apple additionally isn’t occupied with being showy about its AI initiatives. Whereas Apple is rumored to be testing an “Apple GPT” chatbot internally, it’s unlikely we’ll ever see this as a standalone product like ChatGPT.
As an alternative, Prepare dinner pointed to options like iOS 17’s Dwell Voicemail Transcription as one instance of how AI would be the energy behind new options in Apple merchandise quite than one thing that might be a characteristic by itself.
Generative AI apart, the iPhone, iPad, and Mac have already got a wealth of machine studying options baked into iOS and powered by the Neural Engine in Apple’s A-series and M-series chips. Seven years in the past, Apple hit a house run when it added new options in iOS 10 that harnessed the ability of Apple silicon to carry out face and picture recognition instantly on an iPhone. It was an enormous win for privateness and the primary time people might entry these options with out counting on photographic evaluation by cloud providers like Google Photographs.
Since then, Apple has made leaps and bounds in AI-powered areas reminiscent of computational pictures, voicemail transcription, Visible Look Up, language translation, augmented actuality, and a lot extra. There’s a cause Apple snatched up Google’s Head of AI, John Giannandrea, 5 years in the past and shortly appointed him as the primary Senior Vice President of Machine Studying and Synthetic Intelligence Technique. In contrast to different tech firms, Apple doesn’t rent senior executives to maintain places of work heat and fulfill a “vainness metric.” If Giannandrea is Apple’s SVP of AI, it’s as a result of Apple is doing huge issues with AI.
After all, there’s one apparent place the place generative, ChatGPT-style AI might present a substantial increase: Apple’s notorious voice assistant, Siri. Whereas Apple squandered its head begin — Siri got here alongside a minimum of 4 years earlier than Alexa and Google Assistant — it’s been working to course-correct that over the previous few years, and that’s virtually definitely one of many many issues Giannandrea has been tasked with.
On the finish of the day, although, Apple is a product firm. It doesn’t run a search engine like Microsoft’s Bing or Google’s Google, nor does it have cloud-based providers like Gmail and Google Docs to deal with. Nonetheless, as Prepare dinner informed CNBC, synthetic intelligence and machine studying aren’t merchandise however quite “elementary core applied sciences” which can be “just about embedded in each product that we construct.”