Barnes TechCNBC recently got access to one of Apple’s Silicon Chip labs - Inside Apple’s chip lab, home to the most ‘profound change’ at the company in decades.
I thought the video was pretty interesting, but the conclusion toward the end around Apple and AI is a common narrative that doesn’t make sense to me. “Mainstream” news organizations seem to be somewhat obsessed with the idea that Apple is behind in the “AI boom” taking place recently.
I understand where this comes from. Siri to me is a prime example of how you can make the argument that Apple is behind in AI. To this day I can barely stand using Siri because it’s so awful for me. In some cases, it feels like it’s getting worse… But that’s a story for a different article.
Leaving aside the arguments about what “AI” really is, Apple uses in lots of applications. They tend to be really careful to call it ML when they refer to it (more accurately), but it’s all over the place. To me though, this isn’t even the main point that these companies are missing. They tend to just point toward what OpenAI, ChatGPT, and sort of by proxy Microsoft are doing, and to some degree how Google and Amazon are catching up with OpenAI and Microsoft. This seems to be something they like lumping together because they are all in “Tech”, but it doesn’t make sense to me. That type of “AI” is really only going to be possible in the cloud with huge server farms to train the models, and make them accessible to whatever degree necessary as a cloud service. This is just not an area Apple is interested in. There are hundreds of services offered by the big cloud giants that Apple has no direct answer for, and I don’t think it makes any sense for them to.
I’m certain Apple is working on internal models to be used in their products, and possibly even for internal use. We also know that if they are doing this, Apple will be a lot more conservative with safety and privacy, and this will always put them behind the “state of the art” with this type of tool, and that’s ok. Reports like the CNBC ones seem to think that this is an existential threat to Apple if they don’t have something in the space soon, but I don’t see the relation. I can access all of these technologies from Apple devices when needed, because they are on the cloud. There are definitely times I wish Apple were better at cloud/internet type services on their own, but it clearly hasn’t impacted their ability to be the most valuable company in the world, and I don’t really think the “AI” tools will change that.