Is Apple part of the current AI revolution?

I read an article yesterday “Apple, what happened? Neural networks are already changing the world, but Cupertino is silent” and was surprised that the fans of the company Apple as if they know nothing about their favorite office.

The article discusses some of the implications AI– the revolution that the chatbot has made in the last couple of months ChatGPT. What Google is in a panic introduced “code red” and is trying to show the results of its many years of AI development. What Microsoft Instantly invested billions of dollars in the project OpenAI and has already introduced a new version of the AI search engine Bing based on the chatbot ChatGPT. It is also widely known that apart from Google And Microsoftsuch large corporations as Meta Platforms, Amazon, IBM, Intel, Nvidia invest a lot of money in the development of AI technologies and from time to time do not hesitate to talk about it. But Apple seems to be watching all this from the sidelines. orgy until he gets into this fight.

But this is not the case at all, and I will try to convince you that Apple has been trying to become a leader in the emerging market for AI services and applications over the past few years.

1). In Apple Corporation for about 5 years among senior management, there is a position: “Senior Vice President for machine learning and development strategies artificial intelligence“ (Senior Vice President Machine Learning and AI Strategy), which reports directly to the CEO of the company – Tim Cook and is engaged in the development personal assistant Siriown search engine Spotlight embedded in various Apple software and services, embedding AI functions in applications such as “Camera”, “Photo” etc., development AR / VR -software (which for the most part does not work without AI) and something else (which is not advertised for the time being).
This position is currently held by John Giannandrea — who has been working at Apple for almost 5 years, and before that he worked at Google for 8 years. And it is believed that Giannandrea gathered at Apple the best team of the best AI specialists – for example, some time ago (or maybe still) he worked for Apple Ruslan Salakhutdinov is a mathematician, professor at a Canadian university who, back in the early 2000s, together with other like-minded people, was at the forefront of modern approaches to deep machine learningthat made possible the modern boom in technology artificial neural networks! It is said that Apple even has its own secret scientific laboratory based near University of Cambridge– which is the main link in the chain for the development of technologies for voice recognition and meaningful dialogues (see: What is Apple doing in Cambridge?.

2). Apple is one of the first, since 2017 (starting with the chip Apple A11) started embedding in their mobile and now desktop chips apple silicon a separate powerful multi-core Neural Engine block – which is an integrated AI accelerator. – And the question is “why a goat button accordion” if AI applications are not used on Apple devices?

3). And most importantly, over the past 12 years, Apple has already bought up about 30 startups and small companies developing AI projects and AR / VR – projects using AI. You can see for yourself by viewing a more or less complete List of Apple acquisitions – see for example some of them:

April 2010 – Siri (Voice control software);
September 2010 – Polar Rose (facial recognition);
2013 – Novauris Technologies (Speech recognition);
September 2015 – Perceptio (machine learning, image recognition);
January 2016 – Emoticon (Emotion recognition);
August 2016- Turi (machine learning);
September 2016 – Tuplejump (Machine learning);
March 2017- Workflow (Automation and scripting app);
May 2017 – Lattice Data (Artificial intelligence);
October 2017 – init.ai (Messaging assistant);
December 2017 – Silicon Valley Data Science (Data science, data engineering, analytics);
2018 – Laserlike (Machine learning);
2018 – Silk Labs (Artificial Intelligence, home monitoring);
September 2018 – Shazam (Music and Image recognition);
February 2019 – PullString (Speech technology);
June 2019 – drive.ai (Autonomous vehicles);
January 2020 – Xnor.ai (edge computingartificial intelligence);
April 2020 – Voysis (Artificial intelligence/voice assistant);
January 2021 – Curious AI (Core AI startup);
February 2022 – AI Music (Music production).

So what can Apple be doing in its secret labs?

For example, rumors have long circulated that perhaps Apple will release its own super intelligent search engine with artificial intelligence to replace Google (see for example: “Why Apple can launch its own search engine and why the company needs it”). Especially since he John Giannandrea I did exactly this at Google (introducing artificial intelligence into a search engine), and since at one time Apple bought up a bunch of startups related to information search.

Rumors have also leaked that Apple is making its automated AI-based system for writing software code better than GitHub Copilot – developed by Microsoft and Open AI. And the gradual development of more and more automation in tools such as Apple Xcode for your native language Swift – is an indirect confirmation of this.

Of course, probably everyone has heard that for many years Apple has been sawing its own autopilot with AI for unmanned vehicle (cm.: “So Apple makes their car or not?”), and this is a very difficult task, but it is perhaps the coolest AI application of our time.

Here is another list of the 10 best AI services and applications of our time on more advanced analogues that Apple can work on – see: “Intellectual Excellence: Top 10 AI Services and Applications”.

So Apple doesn’t sleep at all, they are gradually – evolutionarily developing their intellectual assistant Siri (which gets better every year), and yes, until they made a revolution in the field of AI, but something is clearly boiling and boiling inside, and perhaps in the next year or two we will be able to see the result of this internal kitchen!