Tim Cook Promises Apple Will ‘Break New Ground’ in Generative AI Innovations This Year

Apple CEO Tim Cook has announced that Apple will "break new ground" in Generative AI (GenAI) this year. This statement was made during the company's annual shareholders meeting, coinciding with reports that Apple has abandoned its ambitious multibillion-dollar plan to develop an electric vehicle (EV). Some of the team members from the EV project are being reassigned to various GenAI initiatives, according to several sources.

Apple CEO Tim Cook: "Breaking New Ground in Generative AI"

— Walter Bloomberg (@DeItaone) February 28, 2024

Unlike many of its Big Tech competitors, Apple has taken a cautious approach to investing in and advancing GenAI. During Q1 earnings calls, Cook reiterated that while Apple is experimenting with GenAI internally, it is focusing on a more measured rollout for customer-facing applications. The company briefly mentioned GenAI during recent press conferences, notably when it unveiled new autocorrect and text prediction features in iOS last fall.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is planning to enhance both Siri and the iOS search tool, Spotlight, with GenAI capabilities, enabling them to respond to more complex inquiries and engage in sophisticated multi-turn conversations. Additionally, the company is exploring AI-driven features to let users generate presentation slides in Keynote and create playlists in Apple Music, alongside GenAI-assisted coding suggestions in Xcode, their app development platform.

Some of these innovations may debut in forthcoming versions of iOS, macOS, and iPadOS, which are anticipated to be showcased at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this summer. In a sign of Apple's growing commitment to GenAI, company engineers have co-authored a notable increase in academic and technical papers related to this technology. One paper discusses a system capable of generating animated 3D avatars from short videos, while another introduces Keyframer, a tool for animating still images.

In recent months, Apple has also released multiple open-source models and tools for developing GenAI-enabled software. This includes Ferret, a chatbot designed on the open-source model Vicuna launched in October, and MGIE, a model that modifies images based on natural language instructions, released earlier this year.

According to a report from Bloomberg in October, Apple is investing $1 billion annually to catch up in the GenAI race. This includes initiatives like developing a proprietary large language model known as Ajax and an internal chatbot dubbed Apple GPT. Additionally, rumors suggest that the upcoming iPhone 16 models may feature a "significantly" upgraded Neural Engine, aimed at accelerating on-device AI processing.