Everyone wants to talk about AI. Most don’t know what it is (artificial intelligence), but still want to talk about it. Who has it and who doesn’t. Which industries it is ripe to disrupt. And the only company that is not at the center of that conversation is Apple.
Viral images generated by Stable Diffusion and pathological chatbots from OpenAI, Microsoft and Google are the story of the day. Apple, meanwhile, has nothing. Or maybe, given Siri’s current state, less than nothing.
Apple is nowhere near AI. That’s the story. The point is, it’s not true. At least not yet.
Presentation of the neural motor
It’s hard to imagine Apple as a company sleeping on the AI switch when it built its first machine learning-focused custom silicon, the Neural Engine, into the A11 chip released five years ago. in iPhones was delivered and has continued to upgrade it almost every year.
If you hadn’t noticed, Apple is pretty serious when it comes to its chip designs. And for the past five years – and who knows how many years of development before that – Apple has believed so strongly in empowering its devices to run machine learning algorithms that it has designed and added special processor cores specifically for the job . Apple clearly understood the power of this technology before most of us even had heard of it.
And it’s clear that Apple has been paying attention to the latest trends that have caught the attention of the world. Last December, Apple released its own Apple Silicon optimizations for the Stable Diffusion image generation engine. That’s Apple looking at the latest trends and pinpointing ways to better utilize its hardware to take advantage of them.
Weaving AI webs
A few weeks ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook used an interesting word when describing Apple’s approach to AI: “weave”. Apple weaves AI algorithms in its products, he said.
And he’s absolutely right. Apple has been dropping purpose-built machine-learning algorithms into its software since at least 2016 when it added object, face, and scene identification to the Photos app. Since then, Apple has not only expanded the algorithms for Photos, but also added machine learning techniques to biometric security identification, ECG on the Apple Watch, fall and crash detection on both the iPhone and Apple Watch, and many aspects of creating the perfect iPhone camera image .
Peter Ahrnstedt
Unfortunately for Cook and Apple, none of those examples have been what people have been talking about lately. But there is no denying that – carefully and tactically –weave AI puts years into its products. As Cook said, ‘We’ll continue weaving [AI] in our products on a very thoughtful basis.”
Your chatbot lied to me
But thoughtful weaving is unlikely to set the world on fire. Chatbots and image algorithms, on the other hand, are flashy and tend to amaze people who can’t believe computers are capable of such things. Apple is like a wizard, someone who prefers to keep his method secret.
Apple’s care and conservatism in product releases have both helped and hurt it here. There may be no such thing as bad publicity, but high-profile chatbot launches are immediately followed by days or weeks of coverage of bad chatbot behavior. The image algorithms immediately came under fire due to questions of copyright infringement.
Can you imagine the storm that would have happened if Apple launched a “beta” version of Siri powered by an AI chatbot that couldn’t get the facts right, tried to get a reporter to leave his wife for it, and accused a professor of sexual harassment? It would be Sirigate! Apple would rush PR for crisis management and promise to solve the problem.
Michael Simon/IDG
That’s why Apple is careful and considerate. It holds itself to a higher standard – and it knows the world does too.
So what now?
That’s all well and good, but the fact remains that Siri isn’t very good, and when you talk to an AI chatbot, you start to feel like we’re very close to a world where semi-intelligent agents will be in able to have contextual conversations and perform basic tasks.
Recently, a friend needed help parsing a gigantic data file. I realized I could probably write a quick Python script to give it the output it wanted. But instead of doing that, I asked ChatGPT to do it. It came with a working script in less than a minute.
As I see it, Apple’s biggest AI risk is not getting the world’s attention. It’s the company’s commitment to caution and thoughtfulness, because if taken to the extreme, it could lead Apple to turn its back on promising areas of research. Sure, a chatbot mishap would be very embarrassing for Apple, but so would Siri when the world is filled with much more capable intelligent assistants.
In other words, Apple is likely to announce a mixed reality headset next month. By most accounts, the device will be very expensive and shipped in extremely small quantities, but it’s a risk Apple is willing to take as it plays the long game. Shouldn’t Apple be willing to do the same and take more risks with AI-powered technology when the rewards are potentially this great?
