Apple CEO Tim Cook has promised that the company will “break new ground” with GenAI this year.
Cook made the announcement today at the company's annual general meeting, the same week the company was reported to have scrapped a multibillion-dollar, 10-year EV manufacturing plan. Ta. According to multiple publications, some of the EV project's staff has been redeployed to work on various GenAI initiatives.
Unlike many Big Tech rivals, Apple has been slow to invest in and enhance GenAI.
Cook said during the company's first-quarter earnings call that Apple is working with GenAI internally, but is taking a slower, more measured approach to bringing the technology to life for customers. Stated. In fact, Apple has only briefly mentioned GenAI in recent press conferences and announcements, such as last fall when he introduced new autocorrect and text prediction features to iOS.
Bloomberg's Mark Garman says Apple is upgrading Siri and Spotlight, iOS' built-in search tool, with GenAI models with the goal of allowing them to answer more complex queries and handle sophisticated multi-turn conversations. It is reported that they are planning to do so. Apple is also considering AI-powered features that would allow users to automatically generate Keynote presentation slides and Apple Music playlists, as well as GenAI-powered coding suggestions in Xcode, the company's app development platform. It is said that
Some, or none, of these may be included in the next versions of iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, and will be demonstrated at Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference this summer.
Perhaps signaling Apple's increased focus on GenAI, its engineers are increasingly co-authoring academic and technical papers related to GenAI. One describes a system that can generate animated 3D avatars from short videos. The other details Keyframer, a tool that allows you to animate still images.
Notably, in recent months, Apple has also released a number of open source models and tools for developing GenAI-powered software.
Ferret, released in October, is a chatbot built on top of the existing open source model Vicuna, while MGIE, released earlier this year, is a model that can modify images based on natural language commands. .
Bloomberg reported in October that Apple is investing $1 billion a year to catch up with GenAI. That includes initiatives such as a proprietary large-scale language model called Ajax and an internal chatbot known as Apple GPT, and could even include new hardware. The next iPhone 16 models are rumored to have a “significantly” upgraded Neural Engine, Apple's brand of custom on-device chips that accelerate AI processing.