Despite Apple’s recent focus on AI, it would be easy to think the company is behind the curve. Almost all of Apple’s competitors have fallen over themselves to catch up since ChatGPT took the world by storm in late 2022. Despite discussing AI and releasing some products with AI in mind, Apple has seemed to dip a toe in rather than dive in headfirst. However, over the past few months, Apple may have just been biding its time before making its big move.
Rumors suggest Apple has been secretly working on game-changing AI upgrades. Reports say Apple is in talks with AI leaders OpenAI and Google about powering new features and has developed its own model called Ajax. Looking closer at Apple’s research gives clues to what may be coming. Apple is focused on making AI faster, smarter, and more helpful, right on your device without the internet.
In research papers, Apple showed how AI can run on your phone’s storage instead of just memory, speeding it up over 20 times faster. They also developed a way to shrink AI down to a tiny size without losing much ability. This will allow features like Siri to work instantly without wakeup words. Apple trained models to better understand gestures, rare words, follow-up questions, and more.
Exciting upgrades could bring AI to photos, health data, and more. Apple created tools to edit pictures or remix audio just by describing changes. Their research may help make sense of all your device’s health information too!
But the biggest project is Ferret, an AI that can understand what’s on your screen or camera and could completely change how we use phones. If linked with an upgraded Siri, your iPhone may soon be able to use apps itself!
By WWDC in June, we could see many of these secret AI upgrades revealed. With projects like this, it seems Apple has been far from behind—they’ve been stealthily preparing some exciting artificial intelligence advances!
