img {
max-width: 100%;
height: auto;
}

Joe Maring / Digital Trends

As Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) draws nearer, the talk about the company’s AI endeavors has taken on a feverish pitch. In a year when smartphone and computing brands have centered solely on the niceties of AI, Apple has been unusually quiet regarding the AI hype, causing concern that the brand might be missing out on the train.

Contents

• New details on Apple’s AI plans
• How far is Apple in the AI race?

However, a recent report has offered us a closer look at how Apple’s AI dreams might come to fruition with its iOS 18 update later this year.

New details on Apple’s AI plans

Andy Boxall / Digital Trends

It appears that Apple is indeed in the game, but with a distinct approach as compared to its rivals. “Apple has been developing a large language model—the algorithm that underpins generative AI features—and all indications suggest that it will be entirely on-device. This means the technology is powered by the processor inside the iPhone rather than in the cloud,” reports Bloomberg.

Rumors of an internal tool codenamed “AppleGPT” have been circulating for some time now. However, it seems that Apple hasn’t yet reached the level of finesse achieved by the likes of Google and Microsoft (with OpenAI) with tools like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Gemini. This also explains recent reports claiming that Apple might license Gemini AI from Google—as Samsung and OnePlus have done for iPhones—instead of offering a product that doesn’t quite stand out.
Or, to put it more accurately, it doesn’t meet Apple’s standards. Even generative AI tools based on the largest data sets continue to fail in a rather spectacular manner, at least in their early stages. Google recently had to apologize for a significant blunder with Gemini AI’s text-to-image system. Meta’s AI is not far behind. Then there is the whole storm brewing over copyright laws, fair disclosure, and training transparency, which is something Apple would like to avoid.

But it seems that rather than promoting the so-called AI snake oil, Apple intends to take a more cautious approach. “Rather than touting the power of chatbots and other generative AI tools, Apple plans to show how the technology can benefit people in their daily lives,” adds the Bloomberg report.

Ever since ChatGPT made its appearance and sparked an AI revolution, we have witnessed a flood of AI tools capable of everything from generating realistic pictures and cloning voices to creating photorealistic videos from text and engaging in kinky chat as a virtual partner. Yet, the biggest question is just how practical and rewarding these flashy tricks are for an average consumer on a day-to-day basis.

But that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t trying to stand out in the AI race. Quite the contrary. In recent months, Apple has released multiple research papers documenting an AI tool called MGIE that can perform tricks like media editing with voice commands. Another paper details MM1, a multimodal large language model that paves the way for “enhanced in-context learning and multi-image reasoning.”

How far is Apple in the AI race?

Joe Maring / Digital Trends

We recently analyzed another piece of Apple research that focuses on AI making sense of on-screen content and providing assistance accordingly. The following tweet by an Apple engineer on X, formerly known as Twitter, details the progress Apple has made compared to rivals like Google’s Gemini AI model:

This is just the beginning. The team is already hard at work on the next generation of models. Huge thanks to everyone that contributed to this project!

— Brandon McKinzie (@mckbrando) March 15, 2024

Other papers have discussed AI within the context of privacy and security, which is not surprising for Apple. The on-device approach mentioned earlier is central to this whole privacy approach. Running AI models on-device would ensure that no data leaves the iPhone. This contrasts with sending user requests to a cloud server, a strategy that also slows down the entire human-AI interaction chain.

Plus, Apple already has the necessary core hardware in place. The company has been incorporating a neural processing unit (NPU) in iPhones since 2017. It is a dedicated AI accelerator hardware, working in a similar way to the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) inside Google’s Pixel smartphones that are now capable of running the Gemini model on-device. Interestingly, Apple also laid the groundwork quite some time ago.

At WWDC 2022, the company released what it calls “an open-source reference PyTorch implementation of the Transformer architecture.” Transformers are the fundamental tool behind the entire generative AI technology. This Financial Times article provides an excellent (and understandable) explanation of the transformers technology that originated from a Google research paper back in 2017, the same year we got an NPU inside the iPhone X.

The latest Bloomberg report notes that Apple will showcase a glimpse of its AI approach at WWDC 2024, which is set to begin in June. Will an on-device generative AI approach finally make Siri smarter in the way Google has been trying to enhance Google Assistant lately? Only time will tell.