A bit early to write off #Apple #AI. Why pick on #Siri? It was released in 2011 with iPhone4S just as a voice assistant!

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/05/openai-gpt4o-siri-iphone/678371/

It is funny to see how tech media seems to think Apple is totally out of the AI game. “OpenAI just killed Siri”? As if Apple will just give up and let OpenAI take over the tech world?

If anything, Apple was far too early with Siri back in 2011, having bought the Siri app in 2010 and integrated it into iOS. That’s over a decade ago. It was mainly a voice assistant helping with small tasks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siri

Siri can’t be the only way Apple been using AI, if anything, we know that voice assistant didn’t really catch on. Alexa, Cortana, Google Now, all ends up being just for simple voice commands around the house. But simply voice command was key for AirPods, HomePods and even HomeKit to work well. I have been using Siri to control all lights and air conditioning at home since 2018.

Regardless, Apple didn’t miss the AI wave. They hired John Giannandrea from Google in 2018 as SVP of ML and AI. Sure, OpenAI and Microsoft seems to be having all the success so far, but no one else seems to be standardising their hardware for on-device AI. All the face/photo recognition without having to load everything to cloud for processing, all the voice to text and translation, all done on device. Not saying that on-device mode is the only way to do AI, but can be a key difference in their offering, a fully privacy enabled AI usage.

But will Apple end up licensing or partnering with OpenAI or Google? How can they deal with all the data privacy issues? Is it such a core tech that Apple will want to own in-house? Too early to guess, just wait for another month and we will have a better idea. Why spoil the fun? OpenAI is not taking over the world just yet.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/10/business/apple-siri-ai-chatgpt.html