Artificial Intelligence (AI) took the world by storm as millions of people flocked to services such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing AI. The company that has been at the forefront of smartphones and technology was left gasping for air thanks to the sudden popularity of AI. I am talking about Apple which took the sidelines as its competitors got their hands in a pot of gold exploring various AI-laden services. Turns out the Cupertino-based giant is ready to make up for the lost time and is working on incorporating generative AI on its next big OS – iOS 18 launch.
Apple working on generative AI for iOS 18
Bloomberg’s analyst Mark Gurman took it to the latest edition of his newsletter Power On to discuss what’s happening in Cupertino. For now, Microsoft, Google, and even Amazon are actively using AI to distribute to millions of users. Cut to now, Apple is working on overhauling next year’s iOS 18 backed by AI.
Although Apple was caught off guard by the sudden influx of users getting the hold of AI services available today, Tim Cook says they have been working on generative AI technology for years. These claims are best left uncertain at the moment and instead, you should be excited as Apple wants to make up for the lost time.
Apple developed its large language model (LLM) framework called Ajax to test out AI. They even internally tried a chat nicknamed ‘Apple GPT’ to understand the functionality. As of now, the Cupertino giant is working on analyzing if their AI can snuff against the competitors.
Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea – senior VPs in charge of AI and software engineering at Apple have joined forces along with the head of services at Apple – Eddy Cue, to handle the massive undertaking that is estimated to cost around $1Bn per year.
As of what we know so far, Federighi is overhauling the next-gen iOS 18 implementing the company’s LLM in various features. LLM is trained on a treasure of data that gave it prowess in terms of AI Capabilities. iOS 18 is expected to get AI functionalities across Siri and Messages apps beyond.
Giannandrea is working on revamping Siri as well and should be ready as early as next year. Cue is working on pushing AI to Apple apps including Apple Music and a suite of productivity apps by Apple including Pages.
There’s an ongoing debate about whether to implement AI on-device or via cloud, both of which have their pros and cons. It seems like Apple could take a hybrid approach that gives the ability to use on-device processing (including security and privacy) to some of the features while the more advanced tasks could get cloud-based processing.
All in all, we are quite certain that Apple will roll out Generative AI sometime next year although there are no dates available. iOS 18 will undergo beta testing early next year which gives us a few months before we get to use AI-powered iOS 18 to some extent if not full-fledged until the last leg when iOS 18 launches officially.
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