This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook told a group of analysts that AI will be “huge”, but also warned that ‘a number of issues’ with the technology need to be addressed.
The statement came as Apple revealed its better-than-forecasted earnings report, an impressive feat for the only big tech company that managed to avoid making the mass layoffs that the likes of Google, Meta, and Microsoft have had to make.
Apple has been pretty quiet on AI, but is the company really playing catch up, or simply keeping its cards close to its chest? Or, does it just not need to fight this battle (yet, at least), as it didn’t when social media networks were springing up left, right, and centre in the late 2000s? We take a closer look.
Apple’s AI Efforts: Less Than Impressive
Some reports suggest that one of the reasons we’ve heard very little from Apple on the topic at hand, at least in comparison to other big tech companies, is internal organizational issues and dysfunctional AI development processes.
An article published in The Information last week claims that members of Apple’s AI and machine learning groups believe that Siri’s development has been a complete mess.
Staffers are reportedly frustrated at how little the virtual assistant tool has been improved since its launch over a decade ago, back in 2011.
Apple’s decision to end remote work in 2022, which led to the departure of key figures like Iain Goodfellow, Director of machine learning, can’t have helped either. To make matters worse, Ian joined Google shortly afterward, expressing disdain for the company’s mandated return-to-office policy.
Some other sources suggest the issue may be deeper than personnel, however. The control Apple generally wants to exert over its products and its unwavering commitment to privacy have both been cited as potentially hampering AI development efforts.
Apple Teams in Turmoil?
Some reports suggest that one of the reasons we’ve heard very little from Apple on the topic at hand, at least in comparison to other big tech companies, is internal organizational issues and dysfunctional AI development processes.
An article published in The Information last week claims that members of Apple’s AI and machine learning groups believe that Siri’s development has been a complete mess and that staffers are frustrated at how little the virtual assistant tool has been improved over time.
Apple’s decision to end remote work in 2022, which led to the departure of key figures like Iain Goodfellow, Director of machine learning, can’t have helped either. To make matters worse, Ian joined Google shortly afterward, expressing disdain for the company’s mandated return-to-office policy.
Some other sources suggest the issue may be deeper than personnel, however. The control Apple generally wants to exert over its products and its unwavering commitment to privacy have both been cited as potentially hampering AI development efforts.
Apple’s AI Efforts Going Under the Radar?
Speaking this week, Tim Cook said that Apple ‘will continue weaving [AI] into our products on a very thoughtful basis’, although declined to give any more specifics on the tech giant’s roadmap.
So, what AI projects is Apple currently working on? Recently, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman revealed that the company is creating an AI-powered health app, which will function as a health-coaching service that can analyze your emotions using machine learning.
It would be foolish to suggest that alleged organizational issues surrounding one product are, in and of themselves, evidence that a company the size of Apple – which has its own machine learning lab – is lagging behind other tech companies in this context.
Yes, Siri might have its faults – and it’s something many of us take for granted as a simple phone function – but it’s still an AI project.
Apple has been developing, and iterating on AI within its products for decades – there’s artificial intelligence embedded in Apple products that users may not even be aware of.
“Deep Fusion”, for instance, is a machine learning-aided camera function that can optimize and improve photos pixel-by-pixel in a matter of seconds – and it’s inside every iPhone 11. This is a good reminder that artificial intelligence and machine learning is a much wider field than the chatbots making the headlines at the moment, which is simply one example of it how it can be used.
Does Apple Need to Join the AI Arms Race Now?
Naturally, it’s doubtful that Apple will view the AI revolution as a fad – as Tim Cook says, it’s going to be huge. There’s no doubt that they’re taking it seriously. But their obvious lack of an exciting, publicized flagship AI project says a lot about the company’s approach to paradigm shifts in the tech industry.
Indeed, it wouldn’t be too surprising to find out that the company views AI as a public conversation it doesn’t necessarily need to be at the center of, at least for the time being. This can be best understood when you compare Apple to the likes of Meta and Twitter.
Apple is sitting on infinitely more cash reserves than Meta, manufactures and sells a suite of the world’s most popular consumer hardware products, and hasn’t had to make swathes of layoffs to keep itself afloat.
The company has comparatively little to prove to investors, traders, and the general public at this moment in time with regard to its value. It’s also not as reliant on users/customers returning to digital spaces it owns that could be immediately affected by AI, such as a social media network or a search engine.
The First to Market Doesn’t Always Win
Releasing a half-baked chatbot or some sort of proprietary, consumer-facing artificial intelligence would not necessarily do the company any good – just ask Google, who rushed the release of Bard in the wake of ChatGPT’s success to significant ridicule.
Similarly, Meta’s push for the metaverse last year, while not dead in the water, has hardly done the company many reputational favors thus far.
In fact, Apple is rarely the first to release new types of technology – it wasn’t the first company to bring out a Smartphone, while the first iPod was only released once portable music players were already widely used.
Apple isn’t insecure about its position in the tech industry when it comes to innovation, or artificial intelligence for that matter – and it’s not going to throw its weight around the latest conversation just for the sake of it.
Unless you work for Apple, you’re unlikely to get a heads-up on precisely how the trillion-dollar company is experimenting with and developing AI products. But considering everything we know about Apple, it’s unlikely that they’re lagging behind – rather, they’re probably just biding their time.
