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Apple CEO Tim Cook promises that Apple will “innovate” on GenAI this year.
Cook made the statement today at the company’s annual shareholder meeting, which took place the same week the company reportedly scuttled its multibillion-dollar, ten-year plan to build an electric vehicle. Some EV project staff have been reassigned to work on various GenAI initiatives, according to has several publications.
Apple, unlike many of its Big Tech rivals, has been slow to invest in and accelerate GenAI.
During the company’s first-quarter earnings conference call, Cook said Apple is working internally with GenAI, but is taking a slower, more deliberate approach to customer-facing incarnations of the technology. Indeed, Apple has only briefly mentioned GenAI in its recent press conferences and announcements, such as when it introduced new autocorrect and text prediction features in iOS last fall.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported that Apple plans to upgrade Siri and iOS’s built-in search tool, Spotlight, with GenAI models, in an effort to both answer more complex queries and handle sophisticated multi-turn conversations . Apple is also reportedly exploring AI-based features to allow users to automatically generate presentation slides in Keynote and playlists in Apple Music, as well as GenAI-based coding suggestions in Xcode, the developer platform. of company applications.
Some of them – or none – could be coming in upcoming versions of iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, which are expected to be demoed at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this summer.
Perhaps due to Apple’s intensifying focus on GenAI, the company’s engineers have co-authored an increasing number of academic and technical articles related to GenAI. A describe a system capable of generating animated 3D avatars from short videos. Another detail Key Imagera tool capable of animating still images.
Obviously, Apple has also released a host of open source templates and tools for developing GenAI-based software in recent months.
Ferret, launched in October, is a chatbot built on an existing open source model, Vicuna, while MGIE, released earlier this year, is a model capable of modifying images based on natural language commands.
Bloomberg reported as of October, Apple was investing $1 billion a year to catch up with GenAI, including efforts such as a large proprietary language model called Ajax and an internal chatbot known as Apple GPT — and potentially even new hardware. Upcoming iPhone 16 models are rumored to feature a “significantly” improved Neural Engine, Apple’s trademark of custom chip on the device to speed up AI processing.
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