Apple CEO Tim Cook dinner is promising that Apple will “break new floor” on GenAI this 12 months.
Cook dinner made the pronouncement through the firm’s annual shareholders assembly right this moment, which got here in the identical week the corporate reportedly scuttled its multibillion-dollar, decade-long plan to construct an EV. Among the workers on the EV mission have been reassigned to work on varied GenAI initiatives, according to multiple publications.
Apple, not like lots of its Large Tech rivals, has been gradual to put money into — and ramp up — GenAI.
In the course of the firm’s Q1 earnings name, Cook dinner stated Apple was working internally with GenAI however that it was taking a slower, extra deliberate strategy to customer-facing incarnations of the expertise. Certainly, Apple’s solely briefly talked about GenAI in its latest press conferences and bulletins, akin to when it launched new autocorrect and textual content prediction options in iOS final fall.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has reported that Apple is planning to improve Siri and iOS’ built-in search instrument, Highlight, with GenAI fashions, with the purpose of enabling each to reply extra complicated queries and deal with refined multi-turn conversations. Apple can also be stated to be exploring AI-powered options to permit customers to mechanically generate presentation slides in Keynote and playlists in Apple Music, in addition to GenAI-powered coding solutions in Xcode, the corporate’s app growth platform.
A few of these — or none — may arrive within the subsequent variations of iOS, macOS and iPadOS, that are anticipated to be demoed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Convention this summer season.
Maybe telegraphing Apple’s intensifying GenAI focus, engineers on the firm have co-authored an rising variety of GenAI-related educational and technical papers. One describes a system that may generate animated 3D avatars from brief movies. One other particulars Keyframer, a instrument able to animating nonetheless photographs.
Conspicuously, Apple’s additionally printed a slew of open supply fashions and instruments for growing GenAI-powered software program in latest months.
Ferret, launched in October, is a chatbot constructed on prime of an current open supply mannequin, Vicuna, whereas MGIE, launched earlier this 12 months, is a mannequin that may modify photographs based mostly on pure language instructions.
Bloomberg reported in October that Apple was investing $1 billion a 12 months to make amends for GenAI, together with efforts like a proprietary massive language mannequin known as Ajax and an inner chatbot often called Apple GPT — and probably even new {hardware}. The upcoming iPhone 16 fashions are rumored to be in line for a “considerably” upgraded Neural Engine, Apple’s model of customized on-device chip for accelerating AI processing.