Sources for the New York Times say that executives noticed last year that the assistant looks old-fashioned next to ChatGPT.
The conversational capabilities of Siri are apparently going to be the primary focus of Apple’s initial set of generative artificial intelligence advancements. According to sources who spoke with The New York Times, officials of the company discovered at the beginning of the previous year that ChatGPT made Siri appear to be obsolete. According to reports, the business came to the conclusion that the large language model (LLM) concepts that underpin OpenAI’s chatbot may provide the virtual assistant on the iPhone with a much-needed boost. It has been speculated that Apple would use its WWDC keynote on June 10 to introduce a new version of Siri that is driven by generative artificial intelligence.
It has been alleged that Apple Senior Vice Presidents Craig Federighi and John Giannandrea examined ChatGPT for a number of weeks prior to the business coming to the conclusion that Siri appeared to be out of date. It is my contention that the realization arrived ten years after it should have. What came next was what The New York Times refers to as Apple’s “most significant reorganization in more than a decade.”
Generative artificial intelligence is a once-in-a-decade tentpole subject that the corporation believes is worth transferring a significant amount of resources to solve. Earlier this year, the business decided to abandon its “Apple Car” project, which was estimated to cost ten billion dollars. Several of those engineers were reportedly moved to work on generative artificial intelligence at Apple.
It is rumored that executives at Apple are concerned that artificial intelligence models will one day replace well-established software such as iOS, which would render the iPhone “a dumb brick” in comparison. The initial generation of dedicated artificial intelligence devices that we have evaluated, such as the Human AI Pin and the Rabbit R1, are not good enough to be considered a danger. These devices are cumbersome, awkward, and overall unappealing. However, this may differ in the future as software continues to advance, other smartphone manufacturers incorporate more artificial intelligence into their operating systems, and other hardware manufacturers have the opportunity to innovate.
Therefore, it would appear that Apple is not introducing direct competitors to generative AI stalwarts such as ChatGPT (words), Midjourney (pictures), or ElevenLabs (voices), at least not for the time being. Instead, it will begin with a new Siri and updated iPhone models that have increased RAM in order to better handle local processing. Furthermore, it has been rumored that the corporation will incorporate a text-summarizing function into the Messages application.
If the sources cited by The New York Times are accurate, it appears that Apple’s initial venture into generative artificial intelligence poses less of an immediate threat to creators than some had anticipated. During the iPad event that took place in May, the business displayed a film that promoted the new iPad Pro. The video included a number of creative tools that were crushed by a hydraulic press. Inadvertently, the video clip acted as the ideal metaphor for the (justifiable) concerns of artists, musicians, and other creators, whose work artificial intelligence models have trained on, and who are at risk of being replaced by the same tools as they become more commonplace for the production of content.
On Thursday, Apple issued an apology for the advertisement and stated that it has scrapped its plans to broadcast it on television.
Both Google and Samsung have already loaded their flagship smartphones with a variety of generative artificial intelligence technologies that go well beyond the enhancement of their virtual assistants. Some examples of these tools are those that allow for the modification of photographs, the generation of text, and the improvement of transcription. In contrast to Apple’s strategy, which is said to prioritize privacy and handle requests locally, these features often rely on servers that are hosted in the cloud for processing. Therefore, it would appear that Apple will begin with a more streamlined strategy that focuses on improving what is already present, in addition to maintaining the majority or all processing happening on the device itself.
According to sources cited by The New York Times, Apple’s culture of internal secrecy and marketing that is centered on privacy have hindered the company’s advancement in artificial intelligence. In an interview with the newspaper, former Siri engineer John Burkey stated that the company’s inclination to compartmentalize the information that different divisions communicate with one another has been another important factor that has contributed to Siri’s failure to progress far beyond the state it was in when it was first introduced, which was the day before Steve Jobs passed away in 2011.