It smells of a somewhat panicked attempt to prepare for WWDC to me. Apple has really dropped the ball on AI and now they're trying to catch up.
They haven’t put an LLM assistant out there. But they don’t make their own search engine either so I don’t think “online LLM assistant” is something they’ll ever put much effort into unless it’s part of a bigger effort to launch their own AI-based search engine as well.
As for generative AI I don’t think the quality is up to a level that would be reasonable for Apple.
The only area where i would expect Apple to keep up is the kind of Copilot integration Microsoft is working on. And we know Apple is working on on-device AI assistant, and probably have for a long time. It’ll be launched when they can get good quality results on-device. Something nobody else has achieved anyway, so we can’t say that they’re behind anyone yet.
That's the public perception. Maybe due to them not getting in on a quick cash grab off the LLM hype wave?
1) Siri
2) Dearth of published AI research
You could argue that publishing research is not the same thing as doing it. But they don't seem to have done much of it until fairly recently.
I agree that Apple does less research than other big tech companies. But they do it where they think it matters. Their M-series CPUs are more than just integration and polishing. And they have been doing some research in health AI as well, I think.
https://machinelearning.apple.com/research seems to have too many publications to be considered a "dearth" IMO.
But I think part of the problem is that Apple simply hasn't focused on the tasks and the methods and the people that have now turned out to be so impactful.
They have clearly been course correcting for a while now as some of the more recent papers show, and they have done successful research in areas such as health AI.
If that's all it takes to stay ahead of the curve, then Rockchip and Qualcomm are arguably right up there alongside them. Tons of vendors shipped their own AI silicon, and of those vendors, it seems like Nvidia is the only one that shipped anything truly usable. Medium-sized LLMs, Stable Diffusion and probably even stuff like OAI Whisper is faster run on Apple's GPUs than their AI coprocessor.
Be careful not to have NVIDIA-shaped tunnel vision. Performance isn't the whole story. It's very telling that approximately everybody making SoCs for battery powered devices (phones, tablets, laptops) has implemented an AI coprocessor that's separate from the GPU. NVIDIA may take exception, but the industry consensus is that GPUs aren't always the right solution to every AI/ML-related problem.
There's not nothing you can run on that Neural Engine, but it's absolutely being misunderstood relative to the AI applications people are excited for today. Again; if chucking a few TOPS of optimized AI compute onto a mobile chipset is all we needed, then everyone would be running float16 Llama on their smartphone already. Very clearly, something must change.
Curious then, why they keep recruiting search engineers[1]. And why they run a web crawler[2]. And why typing "Taylor Swift" into safari offers a Siri Suggested website before Google.
I guess what people mean by search engine is "show ads alongside web search to as many people as possible"?
1: https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200548043/aiml-senior-s... 2: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204683
Apple put a neural engine on-die in the A11 back in 2017:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_A11#Neural_Engine
The A-derived M-series chips had them from the beginning in 2020:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1#Other_features
Seems like they've been doing machine learning for a while now.
So because their first party AI products are so non-existent, I think WWDC is a desperate attempt by Apple to get third party developers to build compelling AI products. I say desperate because they're already a year behind the competition in this space.
(I can imagine they'll be trying to get developers to build Vision Pro software too, though I hear sales there have collapsed so again, way too little, too late)
What AI products are present in other ecosystems (eg. Android, Samsung, whatever) and missing from Apple?
Honest question: I find the platform distinction largely meaningless in most cases apart from “what your phone looks like” and “can you side load apps”…
I think it’s important to remember that there are a bunch of actual useful AI-driven features out there that aren’t just GenAI chatbots.