It is widely believed that Apple risks letting the burgeoning AI market slip away. While Cupertino has yet to release its first major AI product, Microsoft and Google (and, as Macalope observes, almost everyone else until probably Dunkin’ Donuts) released theirs some time ago .
A report published Wednesday by the Financial Times, however, reveals the extent of Apple’s plan to target this market in the near future. The company has made numerous hires and acquisitions in preparation for what increasingly looks like a major breakthrough in AI.
Since 2017, Apple has made a total of 21 AI-related acquisitions, the most recent being AI video compression startup WaveOne. That’s more than any of its rivals. And it’s unlikely to stop there; The FT quotes Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities, as saying he would be “shocked if they don’t do a big AI deal this year, because there’s an AI arms race going on, and Apple won’t be on the outside looking in. »
Apple is also working to expand its AI capabilities on the workforce side. The company hired John Giannandrea, an AI guru who was head of search at Google, in 2018, and is constantly looking for new talent in this area. What Apple is particularly interested in is generative AI, the area of tools like ChatGPT that can quickly create text or images from a wide range of prompts: according to Morgan Stanley, nearly half of the offerings Apple’s AI usage guidelines include the associated term “Deep Learning.” .
“Apple’s goal,” says the FT, “appears to be to harness generative AI through mobile devices, which would allow chatbots and AI apps to run on the phone’s hardware and software instead than being powered by data center cloud services.” We’ve said it before, but it seems more likely than ever that the iPhone 16 will be Apple’s first AI device.
Apple fans will be happy to hear that the company is taking the important AI market seriously, but some worry that it’s all coming too late. As we reported earlier this month, Apple’s generative AI efforts aren’t expected to come to fruition until 2025 at the earliest.
