Apple showcases its vision for an AI-powered future at WWDC 2024

For years, Apple has avoided using the acronym AI when talking about its products. Not anymore.

The boom in generative AI, sparked in late 2022 by OpenAI, has been the biggest story in the tech industry of late, lifting the chip maker… Nvidia To a market capitalization of $3 trillion and causing a major shift in priorities Microsoft, Google And Amazonwhich are all racing to add technology to their core services.

Investors and customers now want to see what the iPhone maker has in store.

The new AI features will be coming at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which will be held Monday at Apple's campus in Cupertino, California. apple CEO Tim Cook teased “big plans,” a change in approach for a company that doesn't like to talk about products before they're released.

WWDC is not usually a major draw for investors. On day one, the company announces annual software updates for iOS, iPadOS, WatchOS and MacOS in a two-hour video-recorded keynote launch event, delivered by Cook. The show will be on display this year at Apple's headquarters. App developers then get a week of virtual parties and workshops where they learn about Apple's new software.

Apple fans are getting a preview of the software coming to iPhones. Developers can start updating their apps. New hardware products, if they appear at all, are not the showcase.

But this year, everyone will be listening to the most famous acronym in technology.

With more than a billion iPhones in use, Wall Street wants to know which AI features will make the iPhone more competitive against Android rivals and how the company can justify its investment in developing its own chips.

Investors have rewarded companies that demonstrate a clear AI strategy and vision. Nvidia, a major manufacturer of artificial intelligence processors, has seen its stock price triple in the past year. Microsoft, which heavily integrates OpenAI into its products, is up 28% over the past year. Apple was up just 9% over the same period, seeing the other two companies surpass it in market cap.

“This is the most significant event for Cook and Cupertino in more than a decade,” Wedbush analyst Dan Ives told CNBC. “The AI ​​strategy is the missing piece to Apple's growth puzzle and this event should be a showcase event, not a shrug event.”

Executives will take the stage, including software chief Craig Federighi, who will likely address real-world uses of Apple's AI, whether it should run on-premises or in massive cloud clusters and what should be integrated into the operating system versus distributed in an app. .

Privacy is also a major issue, and attendees will likely want to know how Apple can deploy data-hungry technology without compromising user privacy, a focus of the company's marketing for more than half a decade.

“At WWDC, we expect Apple to unveil its long-term vision for its implementation of generative AI across its diverse personal device ecosystem,” Jill Loria, an analyst at DA Davidson, wrote in a note this week. “We believe the impact of generative AI on Apple's business is one of the most profound in all of technology, and unlike many innovations in AI that impact a developer or enterprise, Apple has a clear opportunity to reach billions of consumer devices with generative AI functionality. “

Last month, OpenAI unveiled a voice mode for its AI software called ChatGPT-4o.

In a short demo, OpenAI researchers held up an iPhone and spoke directly to the bot inside the ChatGPT app, which was able to do impressions, speak smoothly, and even sing. The conversation was quick, the bot offered advice, and the voice sounded like a human. More demonstrations at the live event showed the robot singing, teaching trigonometry, translating and telling jokes.

Apple users and critics immediately recognized that OpenAI offered a preview of what Apple's Siri could be in the future. Apple's voice assistant debuted in 2011 and has since gained a reputation for being unhelpful. It's rigorous, and can only answer a small percentage of well-defined queries, partly because it relies on older machine learning techniques.

Apple could partner with OpenAI to upgrade Siri next week. Licensing the chatbot technology from other companies has been discussed as well, including Google and Cohere, according to a report by The New York Times.

Apple declined to comment on the OpenAI partnership.

One possibility is that Apple's new Siri won't directly compete with full-featured chatbots, but will enhance its existing features, asking queries that can only be answered by a partner's chatbot. It's close to how Apple Spotlight search and Siri work now. Apple's system tries to answer this question, but if it can't, it turns to Google. This agreement is part of a deal worth $18 billion annually for Apple.

Apple may also be shy about fully embracing an OpenAI or chatbot partnership. One reason is that a malfunctioning chatbot can generate embarrassing headlines, and can undermine a company's focus on user privacy and personal control over user data.

“Data security will be a key advantage for the company and we expect them to spend some time talking about their privacy efforts during WWDC as well,” Citi analyst Atif Malik said in a recent note.

OpenAI's technology is based on web scraping, and ChatGPT user interactions are used to improve the model itself, a technology that could violate some of Apple's privacy principles.

Large language models like OpenAI still have problems with inaccuracy or “hallucinations,” like when an AI told a Google search last month that President Barack Obama was the first Muslim president. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, recently found himself in the middle of a thorny community debate about deepfakes and deception when he denied actress Scarlett Johansson's accusations that OpenAI's vocal mode had shredded her voice. It's the kind of conflict Apple executives would rather avoid.

Beyond Apple, AI has come to rely on large server farms using powerful Nvidia processors paired with terabytes of memory to crunch numbers.

By contrast, Apple wants its AI features to run on iPhones, iPads and Macs, which run on battery power. Cook has highlighted Apple's own chips as superior at running artificial intelligence models.

“We believe in the transformative power and promise of AI, and believe we have advantages that will set us apart in this new era, including Apple's unique combination of seamless integration between hardware, software and services, leading Apple Silicon with our industry-leading neural solutions, and our unwavering focus on Privacy,” Cook told investors in May on an earnings call.

“We expect Apple's presentation at the WWDC keynote to focus on the features and capabilities on the device as well as the GenAI models that run on the device to enable those features,” Samik Chatterjee, an analyst at JPMorgan, wrote in a note this month. Features.”

In April, Apple published research on AI models it calls “effective language models” that could run on a phone. Microsoft is also publishing research on the same concept. One of Apple's “OpenELM” models has 1.1 billion parameters, or weights — much smaller than OpenAI's 2020 GPT-3 model with 175 billion parameters, and even smaller than the 70 billion parameters in one version of dead Llama, which is one of the most widely used language models.

In this paper, Apple researchers benchmarked the model on a MacBook Pro laptop powered by Apple's M2 Max chip, showing that these efficient models don't necessarily need to be connected to the cloud. This can improve response speed and provide a layer of privacy, because sensitive questions can be answered on the device itself, rather than being sent back to Apple's servers.

Some of the features built into Apple's software could include providing users with a summary of their missed text messages, creating images for new emojis, completing code in the company's Xcode development software, or drafting email responses, according to Bloomberg.

Apple may also decide to load its M2 Ultra chips into its data centers to process AI queries that need more horsepower, Bloomberg reported.

WWDC will not be strictly dedicated to AI.

The company has more than 2.2 billion devices in use, and customers want improved software and new apps.

One potential upgrade could be Apple's adoption of RCS, an improvement to the old text messaging system known as SMS. Apple's Messages app funnels texts between iPhones into its iMessage system, which displays conversations as blue bubbles. When an iPhone sends a text message to an Android phone, the bubble is green. Many features such as write notifications are not available.

Google led the development of RCS, adding encryption and other features to text messages. Late last year, Apple confirmed that it would be adding support for RCS alongside iMessage. The debut of iOS 18 would be the logical time to show off its work.

The conference will also be the one-year anniversary of Apple's unveiling of Vision Pro, its virtual and augmented reality headset, which was released in the US in February. Apple may announce its expansion into more countries, including China and the United Kingdom

Apple said in its WWDC announcement that the Vision Pro will be in the spotlight. Vision Pro is currently on the first version of its operating system, and core features, such as Persona video conferencing simulation, are still in beta.

For users with Vision Pro, Apple will present some of its virtual sessions at the event in a 3D environment.