Apple is running years behind in AI race: Report

Apple is running several years behind in Artificial Intelligence (AI) race against its competitors suggests Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

At WWDC24, the iPhone maker introduced an AI suite called Apple Intelligence. It brings several new creative features including generative AI writing tools to change writing tone or rewrite sentences or paragraphs. You can even create an essay from a few words with a new writing tool.

Apple Intelligence also offers smarter notification management. The company has integrated generative image generation capability with Image Playground and Genemoji to create animated avatars and emojis to send in chats with friends and family.

The company has also planned to use its in-house AI servers Siri voice assistant. This will improve the speech recognition and make it sound more natural.

Unfortunately, Apple Intelligence is still running late with its rollout and has not shipped its features even after three months of rollout. What’s more important, Apple has kept the iPhone 16 series waiting after the sale.

A previous report reveals that Apple Intelligence will rollout in batches with iOS 18.1 software update starting in October. However, a major picture of Apple Intelligence may only be related later this year.

This led us to the competition point of view. Here we have to talk about the big players in generative AI including Google, OpenAI, and Meta. These are rapidly deploying their latest large language models (LLMs) and improving their speed and performance.

Gurman cited an internal research at Apple that found ChatGPT was 25% more accurate than Siri and OpenAI’s bot answered 30% more answers.

Some at Apple think the company is several years behind its competitors. Amid this lack of competence, Apple still has an edge over other firms with a large user base. It can deploy these AI features to millions of devices with OTA update and upgrade them overnight.

Still, iPhone 16 and other eligible iPhone users are waiting for the first installment of Apple Intelligence, which is expected to rollout later this month.