AI could enter the Apple ecosystem as early as next year. Mark Gurman states in his Sunday newsletter that the company is working intensively on this issue. A Siri overhaul would be in the works, while AI-related features for iOS and Xcode are in the pipeline.
Apple/MacGeneration image.
While Google and Microsoft entered the AI race earlier this year, Apple is content to watch the train go by for now. We’ve seen the arrival of better spell checker in iOS 17, but the novelty remains timid compared to Windows 11’s AI assistant or the latest Pixel 8. This lack of responsiveness would be viewed as a mistake internally, a source whispered. According to Bloomberg, this delay caused “great concern.”
Mark Gurman says Apple executives were caught off guard by the AI wave and have been struggling to make up for lost time since late last year. Some traces of this work have been mentioned in rumors: Apple would have had an equivalent of ChatGPT in reserve (without really knowing what to do with it), and one report suggests that the company would pay crazy sums to get into the running go.
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Three people would be responsible for this push into AI: John Giannandrea (VP of AI and Machine Learning Strategy), Craig Federighi (VP of Software Engineering), and Eddy Cue (VP of Services). The trio would have the difficult task of leading the company into the industry on a budget of around $1 billion per year.
As technology advances and the market leaders are found, it remains to be seen how they will be integrated into the various systems and services. John Giannandrea would be responsible for an overhaul of Siri with comprehensive AI. The novelty could be ready as early as next year, but the technology would “cause concern” internally. If Mark Gurman doesn’t specify, we can imagine that this is due to the unreliability of the AI, which sometimes tends to say something very believable. It is also quite difficult to implement completely reliable protection measures, as many clever people find loopholes to derail the machine.
The presentation of Siri 2 after DALL-E 3.
For its part, Craig Federighi’s team would add AI to iOS 18. The contract would have been given to provide functions based on Apple’s large language model, internally called Ajax. It’s hard to say what that will look like, but the idea would be to improve the way Siri and the Messages app can answer questions and autocomplete sentences. AI could also make its way into Xcode to help app developers work more efficiently: the idea would be to offer an alternative to GitHub Copilot, which makes suggestions and allows entire blocks of code to appear just by typing a few characters.
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AI could be integrated into many other apps. The Eddy Cue team is considering integration with Apple Music, for example to offer automatically generated playlists. The technology could also be used in Pages or Keynote, for example to provide inspiration or create presentations, similar to what Microsoft and Google offer in Office/Workspace.
Apple is also wondering how it all works. Locally on devices or on remote servers? The first approach would be an obvious choice to protect user privacy and would have the advantage of running faster. However, updating the services would be more complicated as server-side management would simplify the process. Bloomberg hypothesizes mixed management: basic requests would be managed locally, while external servers would handle more complex requests.