The development of AI at Apple continues at a good pace, although under the most absolute secrecy within its laboratories. We know about an LLM model called Ajax and that iOS 18 is going to represent a breakthrough in terms of artificial intelligence, but at the moment no one knows how these advances will be applied to the operating system.
What happens are other clues: they have appeared traces of the so-called Apple MLX, a tool designed specifically for Apple Silic on chips to run generative AI more efficiently. And pay attention, because it’s an open source project that you can check out on Github.
A foundation for developers to bring AI to Apple devices
Developers can use MLX in their code supported by other APIs in Python and C++, and it takes advantage of both the CPU cores and processor cores of chips like the M3 for more efficient generation of content like only pictures. And this is where Apple may have an interesting advantage: that the basis of its AI is optimized while the rest of the engines and models must run on chips without optimization.
The signal is clear: one way or another, Apple wants to offer one or more AI that runs on the device itself taking advantage of this advantage, at least partially. Or at least offer this type of execution to developers who use other AIs. Implemented well, MLX could mean a performance boost that would make iPhones and Macs much more optimized devices than other computers and smartphones.
Apple is not the only one: work is progressing in all companies
Most likely we will see the result of MLX and models like Ajax at the next WWDCwhen the first official details of iOS 18 are revealed. But there are six months until then, and in the meantime, the rest of the big tech companies remain focused on improving their own AI models and engines:
- Microsoft gives its Copilot GPT4 Turbo, increasing the speed of an assistant already integrated into the Windows system. This allows you to send more extensive requests to it, in addition to generating images with DALL-E 3.
- Mistral, an AI of French origin, is rising with interesting promises and a valuation of $2 billion.
- Google Bard is moving forward without stopping with Gemini, its new model to achieve more complexity.
- From a regulatory point of view, the European Union already has a law on artificial intelligence which aims to protect the user.
My bet with all these factors is that 2024 will be a very interesting year for Apple. We must no longer focus only on the imminent Vision Pro, we must also pay attention to AI. I don’t even want to imagine what the two new developments could do together.: a generative AI in a mixed reality domain like visionOS. Big news awaits us.
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