Apple also intends to add what Gurman described as “proactive intelligence” features, such as automatic summaries of iPhone notifications, quick synopses of news articles, transcribed voice memos, and improved existing features such as those that automatically populate your calendar. Gurman also reported that Apple might launch genAI-powered editing tools similar to those found on Google’s Pixel and Samsung’s Galaxy S smartphones. And the company is reportedly eyeing high-end AI-enabled chips for its data centers to enable cloud-based genAI features.
Licensing ChatGPT isn’t going to wow anybody with the latest genAI features from OpenAI or Google. Apple will pay that price, at least temporarily. It’s unclear at the moment what else could emerge from any partnership between Apple and OpenAI — there are rumors OpenAI might integrate ChatGPT natively on the iPhone — but the details should become clear at WWDC.
Finally, according to VentureBeat, Apple researchers have developed a new artificial intelligence system that can “understand ambiguous references to on-screen entities as well as conversational and background context, enabling more natural interactions with voice assistants.”
Called ReALM (Reference Resolution As Language Modeling), it leverages LLMs to handle the complex task of converting reference resolution — including references to visual elements on a screen — into a pure language-modeling problem, VentureBeat reported. This lets ReALM achieve substantial performance gains over existing methods.
Brass tacks
There can be no doubt that the Apple allowed itself to fall behind in the breakneck race for AI supremacy. But the company appears to be moving to rectify that misstep and has taken the only recourse left — licensing a well-regarded chatbot and LLM from another company while it continues to develop an internal approach. This will let Apple dramatically improve Siri, which hasn’t had a significant upgrade since its introduction in 2011. That’s the burning need.
We’ll have to wait another three weeks or so to get the details of Apple’s AI plans. But it would be a mistake to score Apple as an AI loser at this point. We’re still just getting started with AI. So is Apple.
