Apple CEO Tim Prepare dinner is promising that Apple will “break new floor” on GenAI this yr.
Prepare dinner made the pronouncement through the firm’s annual shareholders assembly in the present day, which got here in the identical week the corporate reportedly scuttled its multibillion-dollar, decade-long plan to construct an EV. Among the employees on the EV mission had been reassigned to work on varied GenAI initiatives, in accordance to a number of publications.
Apple, not like lots of its Huge Tech rivals, has been sluggish to spend money on — and ramp up — GenAI.
In the course of the firm’s Q1 earnings name, Prepare dinner stated Apple was working internally with GenAI however that it was taking a slower, extra deliberate method to customer-facing incarnations of the expertise. Certainly, Apple’s solely briefly talked about GenAI in its latest press conferences and bulletins, resembling 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 device, Highlight, with GenAI fashions, with the objective of enabling each to reply extra complicated queries and deal with subtle multi-turn conversations. Apple can also be stated to be exploring AI-powered options to permit customers to robotically generate presentation slides in Keynote and playlists in Apple Music, in addition to GenAI-powered coding recommendations in Xcode, the corporate’s app improvement platform.
A few of these — or none — might 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 tutorial and technical papers. One describes a system that may generate animated 3D avatars from quick movies. One other particulars Keyframer, a device able to animating nonetheless photographs.
Conspicuously, Apple’s additionally revealed 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 high of an present open supply mannequin, Vicuna, whereas MGIE, launched earlier this yr, is a mannequin that may modify photographs primarily based on pure language instructions.
Bloomberg reported in October that Apple was investing $1 billion a yr to atone for GenAI, together with efforts like a proprietary massive language mannequin referred to as Ajax and an inner chatbot often called Apple GPT — and doubtlessly 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.