Apple CEO Tim Cook promises that Apple will “break new ground” in GenAI this year.
Cook made the announcement during the company’s annual shareholder meeting today, which came the same week the company reportedly scrapped a multibillion-dollar, decade-long plan to build an EV. Some EV project staff were redeployed to work on various GenAI initiatives, according to multiple publications.
Apple, unlike many of its big tech rivals, has been slow to invest in — and grow — GenAI.
During the company’s first-quarter earnings call, Cook said Apple was working with GenAI internally, but was taking a slower, more deliberate approach to customer-facing incarnations of the technology. Indeed, it’s all that Apple’s GenAI has briefly mentioned in its recent press conferences and announcements, such as when it introduced new autocorrect and predictive text features to iOS last fall.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has mentionted that Apple plans to upgrade Siri and iOS’s built-in search tool, Spotlight, with GenAI models, aiming to enable both to answer more complex queries and handle sophisticated multi-turn conversations. Apple is also said to be exploring AI-powered features to let users automatically create presentation slides in Keynote and playlists in Apple Music, as well as GenAI-powered coding suggestions in Xcode, the company’s app development platform.
Some of them — or none — could make it to the next versions of iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, which are expected to be unveiled at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this summer.
Perhaps telegraphing Apple’s heightened focus on GenAI, the company’s engineers have co-authored a growing number of GenAI-related academic and technical papers. A describes a system that can create animated 3D avatars from short videos. Other details Keyframera tool capable of bringing still images to life.
Apparently, Apple has also released a number of open source models and tools for developing GenAI-powered software in recent months.
Ferret, released in October, is a chatbot built on top of an existing open source model, Vicuna, while MGIE, released earlier this year, is a model that can modify images based on natural language commands.
Bloomberg mentionted In October, Apple was investing $1 billion a year to cover GenAI, including efforts like a proprietary long-language model called Ajax and an internal chatbot known as Apple GPT — and possibly even new hardware. The upcoming iPhone 16 models are rumored to be in line for a “significantly” upgraded Neural Engine, Apple’s trademark custom chip in the device to speed up AI processing.
