According to recent reports, Apple is preparing to unleash an AI avalanche on the upcoming iPhone WWDC 2024. This will include some cloud-based as well as on-device AI models, but will be through the lens of today’s most prominent and far-reaching AI developer, OpenAI.
Apple’s big developer conference is only three weeks away, but it looks like OpenAI and Apple have finally found common ground to create some kind of AI in iOS. In his latest newsletter, Bloomberg’s Apple guru Mark German reportedbased on its list of anonymous inside sources, that the Cupertino company appears to have finally signed off on this a long-sought deal with OpenAI. Apple had too reportedly tried to court Google to the same end, but now it looks like Apple wants to go to bed with him the people who make GPT-4o.
According to the report, OpenAI’s technology will have direct integration with iOS 18, which appears to be ChatGPT’s direct integration with the company’s most popular product, the iPhone, and the upcoming iPhone 16.
Some of the company’s new features will use AI developed in-house. Gurman noted that Siri will be the first to get an AI facelift, making her more “conversational.”
Based on the latest reports, it will be a lot of what you’ve already seen elsewhere AI article transcripts, voice memo summaries, and AI-based photo editing. These are all things we’ve seen before from people at Adobe and Google, with varying degrees of usability and capabilities. Nothing is mentioned about so-called “multimodal” AI voice and vision features that are now in vogue. Apple will put some of its high-end M-series chips in its data centers to help handle the workload of cloud-based AI.
If it seems like Apple, which usually behaves like a maverick in both software and hardware, is desperately trying to keep up with the Joneses, then apparently some Apple executives think so too. Gurman said some of Apple’s top executives were nervous about adding a chatbot to the iPhone because the AI could lie, manipulate and otherwise cause mischief to the unsuspecting user. Eventually, Apple hopes to build its own chatbot for its devices, but in the meantime, it will need another company to pick up the slack.
It feels like a lifetime now since we’ve had chatbots on iOS, but first OpenAI put your ChatGPT app on iPhone almost exactly a year ago. But we’re quickly moving away from a chatbot-only lifestyle and heading into a future where big language models instead advertise themselves as your “digital assistant.” In fact, chatbots look poised to replace Siri on the iPhone. Google has have already moved towards this inevitability of AI with Gemini on Android. Of course, not all users are happy with the change or how Gemini seems less capable in some cases than Google’s old voice assistant.
You already could make ChatGPT your assistant using Shortcut in iOS, but whether users want it or not, Apple seems to believe it needs to compete directly with Google’s Gemini model. This company spent most of his time own I/O conference for developersshowing how AI is poised to permeate every aspect of Android, Search, Chrome and more.
But Apple also wants to show off its own AI capabilities. The last one iPad Pro with M4 chip boasts 38 trillion operations per second, AKA TOPS. This is supposed to enable the use of AI on the device, although there are few apps that could actually display this AI processing speed. This week, Microsoft will host its own developer conference that will double down (feels like sevenfold at this point) once again on AI. Qualcomm has new chips that boast 45 TOPS, but unless we really find a reason to host AI on the device, it’s all going to feel as pointless as a drunk screaming into an empty pit.
