Apple reportedly ‘years behind’ competitors when it comes to generative AI

In his latest “Power On” newsletter, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman says Apple remains years behind the competition in generative artificial intelligence (AI) and risks missing out as Microsoft, Amazon, Samsung, and Alphabet’s Google actually ship new AI-centric hardware, software and services.

Likely in an attempt to catch up, Apple is purportedly all in on AI. For example, as noted by MacRumors, according to developer sources speaking to the operator of tech news aggregator account “yeux1122” on Naver, Apple has recently made progress with integrating generative AI into ‌Siri‌.

Gurman says that starting with generative AI, Apple’s tools — when they launch — will come nearly two years after ChatGPT began to take the world by storm, about a year after Amazon announced its revamped Alexa and about a year and a half after Microsoft and Google debuted their new services.

“Even for Apple, that’s quite a miss,” he says. “he company plans to announce its offerings, as I’ve previously reported, at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June as part of iOS 18. The underlying work is being done on a large language model dubbed Ajax internally and the company has been testing it since early last year.”

Gurman says that Apple is eyeing adding features like auto-summarizing and auto-complete to its core apps and productivity software such as Pages and Keynote. The company is also purportedly working to merge AI into services like Apple Music, where the company wants to use the technology to better automate playlist creation. And Apple is planning a big overhaul to its digital assistant, Siri.

For developers, Apple is working on a new version of Xcode and other development tools that build in AI for code completion, Gurman adds.. And the company is building a new AI-based system to help AppleCare employees assist customers with troubleshooting.

“But the totality of Apple’s generative AI vision will take at least into 2025 to fully scale,” Gurman writes. “At the same time, the company’s biggest smartphone rival — Samsung — is set to launch a Galaxy S24 line later this month that is all about new AI features.”

This info from Gurman is from the free edition of “Power On”. If you like it, consider subscribing to Bloomberg.com—you’ll receive the newsletter earlier and get exclusive access to a Q&A section.