Will Apple turn to its competitors to power the advanced AI customers expect to see on the next iPhone?
Since the start of the year, Investors have been questioning Tim Cook about Apple’s approach to AI. Just last month, Bloomberg reported Apple was in discussions with both OpenAI and Google to use their respective AI chatbots in iOS 18.
Although Apple does use AI techniques in parts of iOS (notably in image processing and autocorrection), it has missed the recent push for AI smartphones; this was started by Google at the Pixel 8 event a few weeks after the iPhone 15 launch. AI is expected to appear in iOS 18 at the upcoming Worldwide Developer Conference, but it will not be released to the public until September when it will debut on the iPhone 16 family.
No doubt Apple will play up its use of AI “in a way that only Apple can,” I expect that Tim Cook and his team will lean into the idea of local processing of data on an iPhone instead of sending your data into the cloud. Every smartphone manufacturer has put this promise out there since the aforementioned Pixel 8 launch—but the allure of Apple will see this message resonate louder than the same message from the likes of Samsung.
Apple will showcase its AI-based software at WWDC and in iOS 18, yet the potential use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini suggests that the iPhone’s use of generative AI will be much closer to the competition than it may appear.
The machine learning algorithms that Apple is using throughout iOS, from a technical point of view, could be labelled as using AI, but the public perception of Android running away with AI is already established. Apple turning to its competition to power its own generative AI tools will only add to the feeling that the iPhone is behind its rivals.
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