Apple is nowhere to be found. Has the speed of it all caught the world’s most influential tech company by surprise?
Microsoft Corp. has poured $10 billion into OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, and reconfigured how it builds server farms to accommodate more of Nvidia Corp.’s class-leading processors for training artificial intelligence. Alphabet Inc.’s Google has made responding to ChatGPT a top priority. Amazon.com Inc. has also jumped into the fray with its cloud division.
That’s four of the world’s top seven most valuable companies, and yet, the most valuable of them all seems to have no ready answer for what’s coming. Bloomberg reported on an internal AI summit Apple held in February, when machine learning and other deployments of the tech across Apple products were discussed, but there was no hint of anything in the genre of generative AI.
Apple, by all appearances, squandered the lead it established since becoming the first big tech company to make an AI-powered voice assistant. Siri was clearly flawed from the start, but it looks ancient by the standards of ChatGPT…
To be sure, Apple’s AI has steadily improved and the technology has made its way to more parts of the company’s devices. Much of Apple’s AI work is also focused on improving the day-to-day experience of its products, rather than within Siri itself.
For instance, recent camera improvements like Photographic Styles and the ability to peel a subject out of a photograph rely on AI. The self-driving car is a monster AI project, while the headset will leverage AI for live processing of a wearer’s surroundings and to create realistic avatars.
