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Apple Expected To Enter AI Race With Ambitions To Overtake The Early Leaders
Apple’s annual World Wide Developers Conference on Monday is expected to signal the company’s entry into generative artificial intelligence, marking its late arrival to a technical frontier that is predicted to be as transformational as the iPhone.
The highly anticipated showcase of AI built in the iPhone and other Apple goods will be the highlight of an event that normally previews the next generation of software that runs the company’s hardware lineup.
Apple | AP News Image
Apple Expected To Enter AI Race With Ambitions To Overtake The Early Leaders
And Apple’s next generation of software is expected to include a slew of AI technologies that will help its often-bumbling virtual assistant Siri become smarter, making photographs, music, texting, and potentially even creating emojis on the fly a more productive and fun experience.
However, CEO Tim Cook recently hinted that Apple is about to announce its huge intentions to enter the AI race, which has been powering an industry boom over the last 18 months.
AI craze is the primary reason Nvidia, the dominant maker of the processors that power the technology, has seen its market value skyrocket from $300 billion at the end of 2022 to almost $3 trillion. Nvidia’s remarkable rise allowed it to momentarily surpass Apple as the second most valuable corporation in the United States last week. Microsoft surpassed Apple earlier this year due to its successful drive into artificial intelligence.
However, analysts are increasingly concerned that Apple is lagging in the swiftly expanding AI area, exacerbated by the company’s unusually long sales slump. Both Google and Samsung have previously produced smartphone models with AI technologies as the main draw.
That’s why analysts like Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities see Monday’s conference as a potential springboard that will propel Apple into another strong period of growth. Ives predicts that adding more AI to the iPhone, iPad, and Mac computers will result in an additional $450 billion to $600 billion in market value for Apple.
Ives wrote in a research note that Monday’s meeting “represents the most important event for Apple in over a decade as the pressure to bring a generative AI stack of technology for developers and consumers is front and center.”
Apple | AP News Image
Apple Expected To Enter AI Race With Ambitions To Overtake The Early Leaders
Apple may benefit from AI’s boost, especially for its 13-year-old assistant Siri, whom Forrester Research Dipanjan Chatterjee now refers to as an “oddly unhelpful helper.”
Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is becoming more conversational — to the point that it was recently accused of purposefully mimicking a piece of AI software spoken by Scarlett Johansson — while Google last month previewed Astra, an AI “agent” that can appear to perceive and recall things.
Aside from leveraging AI to improve Siri, Apple may collaborate with OpenAI to bring some aspects of ChatGPT to the iPhone, according to various unsubstantiated stories leading up to Monday’s presentation.
This will be the second year in a row that Apple has caused a stir at its developers conference by using it to announce its entry into a popular form of technology in which other businesses have already made inroads.
Last year, Apple gave an early look at its mixed-reality headset, the Vision Pro. It was not introduced until early this year and cost $3,500, a big hurdle to gaining acceptance. Nonetheless, Apple’s drive toward mixed reality, which it calls “spatial computing,” has fueled optimism that what is now a niche technology would grow into a massive market.
Part of the optimism originates from Apple’s history of introducing technology later than competitors and then leveraging beautiful designs and services, paired with slick marketing campaigns, to overcome its late start in launching new trends.
Apple | AP News Image
Apple Expected To Enter AI Race With Ambitions To Overtake The Early Leaders
“Apple’s early reticence toward AI was entirely on brand,” Forrester’s Chatterjee wrote in a preview of the developers conference. “The company has always been famously obsessed with what its offerings did for its customers rather than how it did it.”
Introducing more AI into the iPhone, in particular, is likely to raise privacy concerns—a subject on which Apple has gone to great effort to reassure its dedicated customer base that it can be trusted not to pry too far into their personal lives.
One method Apple may use to convince customers that the iPhone will not be used to spy on them is to use its own chip technology to handle most AI-powered features on the device rather than faraway data centers, commonly referred to as “the cloud.” Taking that approach would also boost Apple’s profit margins because AI technology on the cloud is significantly more expensive than when performed exclusively on a device.
SOURCE – (AP)
