The recent months in the tech scene have been all about artificial intelligence and its impact, but one company that has been late to the party is Apple. Apple first hinted about inhouse-AI development during a recent earnings call, which followed the earlier reports of the company reaching out to major publishers to use their data to train its AI’s dataset, canceling the Apple Car project and shifting the team to AI. However, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple might not debut a ChatGPT-like chatbot, at all. Instead, the company is exploring deals with established tech giants such as China’s Baidu, OpenAI, and Google about potential partnerships.
That said, Apple might instead focus on licensing already-established chatbots like Google’s Gemini (fka Bard) or OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They might delay all plans to release an Apple chatbot, internally dubbed “Ajax GPT”.
Nevertheless, Mark Gurman believes AI will remain in the show’s spotlight at the upcoming Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), slated for June 10-14, 2024 where we expect to see iOS 18, iPadOS 18, watchOS 11, tvOS 18, macOS 15, and visionOS 2. Although he doesn’t delve into details of the upcoming AI feature, he mentions the company’s plans to unveil new AI features, which could serve as the backbone of the next iOS 18. This suggests that even if Apple doesn’t intend to bring a native AI chatbot to the devices, we might see a popular chatbot pre-installed on the phones or supported natively by the device. For reference, a London-based consumer tech firm, Nothing, recently partnered with the Perplexity AI search engine to power up its latest release, Phone 2(a), and Apple might have similar plans, but with generative AI giants.
CEO Tim Cook recently spoke to investors that the company will disclose its AI plans to the public later this year. Despite Apple’s overall reticence on the topic, Cook has been notably vocal about the potential of AI, particularly generative AI.
More importantly, according to previous reports, he has indicated that generative AI will improve Siri’s ability to respond to more complex queries and enable the Messages app to complete sentences automatically. Furthermore, other Apple apps such as Apple Music, Shortcuts, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are expected to integrate generative AI functionality.