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The wait to know ends Apple’s plans to get on the artificial intelligence (AI) train. More than a year and a half after the emergence of ChatGPTwhich caused a shake-up in the technology industry quickly followed by giants such as Google, Microsoft or Samsung, the American multinational apple company is prepared to announce your strategy to face the new technological trend, according to both the rumors of recent months and the statements to investors by Tim Cook, CEO of Apple. Even a leak published by Bloomberg Over the weekend, details of how the company will add smart features to streamline everyday tasks made by users of their phones, computers, tablets, watches, glasses and stereos.
One of Apple’s hallmarks is that it never comments on the new products and features it is working on. They only do it when they are practically ready to go on the market, and they communicate it at one of their big events, like the one that starts this Monday, and which are held every year at the beginning of June: su World Developers Conference (WWDC).
In a tradition that is broken in some years, such as in 2023 with the announcement of the Vision Pro mixed reality glasses, Tim Cook’s keynote speech at WWDC – which begins this Monday at 2 pm, Argentine time – is usually directed at everything to professional software developers and die-hard Apple fans. The company’s directors use this annual event to preview new features coming at the end of winter to the operating systems of the iPhone, Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, Vision Pro or Apple TV. This time, the expectation is once again maximum outside that most intimate circle of followers: the entire technology industry looks towards the movement of Apple, of which A strong entry into the generative AI race is expected. The apple company seeks to break with the idea that it has been left behind in this area.
All analysts They foresee a profound renewal of Siri, the voice assistant that Apple launched in 2011 and that, without major improvements to date, it was first surpassed in many capacities by competing products from Amazon and Google; and then, the arrival of ChatGPT in 2022 has made Siri seem like an obsolete technology, both due to its lack of reliability when interpreting and following orders, and its inability to maintain the thread of the conversation with users.
According to Mark Gurman of Bloomberg, the analyst who in recent years has obtained the most leaks of the news that Apple is going to announce – the most recent, the premiere of the M4 processors in the latest iPad Pro -, the biggest renewal in the history of Siri will be based on great language models like those that drive the chatbots that lead generative AI—OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. In addition to the ability to better understand users and talk to them, which everyone expects, Gurman claims to have managed to get sources involved in the project to leak specific details, which he published in a complete report two days before Tim Cook’s presentation. “For the first time, Users will be able to ask Siri to control a multitude of specific functions and actions within the apps“For example, asking Siri to delete an email, edit a photo or summarize a news story,” says Gurman, who also assures that this ability is initially limited to Apple’s own programs – such as Safari and Mail – and “it is unlikely that “It won’t reach third-party apps until next year.”
Regardless of whether Siri is asked out loud, or the iPhone, Mac or iPad is ordered by clicking buttons, this and other recent leaks indicate that Apple is going to focus on providing generative AI functions that facilitate the daily relationship that users already have with their devices, instead of incorporating spectacular new features such as creating texts and images from scratch; or to offer your users the illusion that they are having an intelligent conversation with a chatbot that has a seductive and emotional voice.
Those practical functions They will reach new operating systems – such as iOS 18, macOS 15 or visionOS 2 -, with the aim of integrating into as many Apple apps as possible., to streamline current day-to-day tasks: summarize emails, text messages, meeting notes and web page content; transcribe audios, sort emails and suggest response texts; or improve images and eliminate people or photos from them, just by saying it, without having to have knowledge of photo retouching. Most of these functions are already offered by the most modern smartphones from Google or Samsung, and also, for years, many of them have been included in third-party apps.
Analysts assume that Tim Cook is going to announce an alliance with OpenAI today and that the CEO of the company that created ChatGPT, Sam Altman, will intervene at the event to comment on details of that alliance that would give OpenAI an advantage in its rivalry with Google for leading generative AI. According to Gurman, “that alliance with OpenAI will give life to a chatbot like ChatGPT”.
For other experts, such as John Gruber of Daring Fireball, This raises many doubts about how this chatbot will work without competing with Siri, whether it will be integrated into the voice assistant itself or within the Spotlight search bar of Macs, iPhones and iPads; or if this intelligent bot will be integrated even more transversally into the operating systems and apps of all Apple devices, with an intention more to offer help on how to use them than to ask them anything, as users do with ChatGPT or Gemini. Gurman wonders “What’s the point of an Apple chatbot, powered by OpenAI if ChatGPT already has excellent applications for iOS and MacOS?”. From their point of view, it would be strange if the fruit of this alliance were an app that competes with them and with Siri.
The most surprising thing about the leak obtained by Gurman is that it gives details such as that the new AI system that Tim Cook will announce today will be called Apple Intelligence. Or also that the new functions that will be grouped under that umbrella will be of optional access, only for users who request them, that they will initially be labeled as beta functions – that is, testing – and that some of them will only be available for devices more modern – in telephones, starting with iPhone 15 Pro—. Lists of specific models of phones, tablets and computers that will support Apple Intelligence functions are already circulating, based on the fact that the company will choose to perform as much intelligent processing as possible on the devices themselves —instead of doing it on cloud servers— and that this will require the most powerful Apple processors, only included in the latest models.
However, several specialists also point out that the system Apple Intelligence will decide in each case whether to carry out the processing on the device itself or on servers in the cloud. The latter would be necessary for the most powerful generative AI functions and would have a lot to do with the planned alliance between Apple and OpenAI: the creators of ChatGPT could rent their servers and their large language models to power the most complex Apple Intelligence functions.
That is, Apple would pay OpenAI a significant sum to use its base technology and thus be able to catch up in the generative AI race. But what is certain, taking into account Tim Cook’s statements in recent months and Apple’s trajectory since he assumed leadership of the company, is that Cook is going to put a lot of emphasis on how they plan to embrace artificial intelligence while maintaining privacy, ethical and copyright commitments.. In the words of analyst Jason Snell, from his column in the veteran magazine macworld, Apple has the opportunity to position itself as “the adult in the room: a company dedicated to using AI for functions that improve people’s lives, instead of competing to perform the best magic trick on stage that is later impossible to reproduce.” With this, Snell refers to the spectacular announcements, followed by striking missteps, that have most recently featured Google, OpenAI or Humane in recent weeks. Demonstrations that promise advances typical of science fiction, compared to the realities of the hallucinations of chatbots and the racist biases of generative AI systems, have become a constant since the technological fever of artificial intelligence was unleashed.
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