According to the latest edition of Mark Gurman’s Power On newsletter, some Apple employees believe the company is about two years behind in its artificial intelligence development. You’ll also get insight into some internal research and an outlook on Apple’s strategy.
Apple Intelligence Summary
Apple announced Apple Intelligence capabilities at WWDC24 in June, marking the company’s first step into the world’s current AI boom. There were a lot of great features Apple built, including AI notification summaries, intelligent breakthroughs for important notifications, all-new Siri with personal context, Image Playground, Genmoji, and more.
But one of the interesting things about Apple’s AI strategy, kept secret until relatively late in the development cycle, is that Apple isn’t doing it all on its own.
Apple Intelligence relies primarily on models that can run on your device. This also means that the requirements for running Apple Intelligence are quite high. A17 or M1 chipset or newer, requires at least 8GB of memory. However, the fact that it runs on a device also inherently limits the amount of information it can provide.
To that end, Apple also announced a partnership with OpenAI for system-wide ChatGPT integration. You don’t have to use it, but you can use it if you want to benefit from additional knowledge.
ChatGPT vs. Siri
OpenAI develops some of the world’s best AI models, and Apple announced support for GPT-4o in iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. This will be integrated into writing tools as well as Siri. It was hoped that the ChatGPT integration would close the knowledge gap, but now we know exactly how big that knowledge gap is.
According to Gurman, Apple’s internal research shows that ChatGPT is about 25% more accurate and can answer about 30% more questions than Siri. He also later said that “some within Apple believe their generative AI technology is — at least for now — more than two years behind industry leaders.”
Apple’s future strategy
Historically, Apple has been successful in catching up in areas where it seemingly lags behind, such as Apple Maps. Garman believes Apple will catch up, whether it does it in-house, hires people or acquires the companies it needs to do so.
Additionally, Garman said that by 2026, Apple Intelligence will be running on every device with a screen, that the iPhone SE will feature the A18 chip in March as expected, and that the entry-level iPad will “probably” It says it will receive an update in late 2025.
Apple clearly has the advantage of having a large fleet of highly capable devices on which to run AI models, and by iterating on AI models, we can all quickly reap the benefits. You will be able to receive it. The question is how Apple will develop things going forward.
What do you think about Apple’s AI strategy? How do you expect Apple Intelligence support in the future? Let us know in the comments.
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