Apple CEO Tim Cook teased that the company will unveil its work on generative AI sometime this year during Apple’s conference call for its fiscal Q1 2024 results.
Cook was asked twice about Apple’s plans for generative AI following strong speculation that the company will go all-in on the latest trend in tech during its annual WWDC event in June. While the CEO understandably didn’t give out any details, he described Apple’s commitment to AI as a “tremendous” one with a lot of time and effort put in.
Cook also said that Apple is “excited” to publicly share its work on generative AI later this year, likely alluding to WWDC 2024. The breadth of AI features heading to iOS 18 has made some people within the company refer to the update as one of the biggest in iPhone’s history.
As we look ahead, we will continue to invest in these and other technologies that will shape the future. That includes artificial intelligence, where we continue to spend a tremendous amount of time and effort and we’re excited to share the details of our ongoing work in that space later this year.
In terms of generative AI which I would guess is your focus, we have a lot of work going on internally, as I’ve alluded to before. Our MO, if you will, has always been to to do work and then talk about work and not to get out in front of ourselves. And so we’re going to hold that to this as well. but we’ve got some things that we’re incredibly excited about, that we’ll be talking about later this year.
Tim Cook
Generative AI features built around Large Language Models (LLMs) will not be limited to Siri, but will also span other apps like Music and Messages as described in an earlier report. For example, one of the goals calls for apps such as Messages and Siri to better understand questions contextually and to provide more accurate auto-complete predictions for sentences and phrases.
AI features beyond iOS 18 could also be heading to software development tools like Xcode, allowing developers to write and test apps faster than before by presenting auto-complete suggestions for written code. Other rumored features include AI-generated playlists on Apple Music as well as auto-generated slide decks and writing assistance on Keynote and Pages.
Cook has made a habit of teasing Apple’s internal work on generative AI in previous conference calls. During the Q4 2023 earnings call, the CEO revealed that Apple was investing “quite a bit” in AI research.
Recent reports agree that the company is spending hundreds of millions of dollars on its AI endeavors, including licensing deals with established publishers to acquire rights to their archives for accurate training of AI models.
