Cook 'incredibly excited' about generative AI coming to Apple gear later in 2024

A Siri icon superimposed on Apple Park

Tim Cook says that Apple is spending "a tremendous amount of time and effort" on AI features that will be announced in the coming months.

Apple's Cook took the opportunity of the firm's latest financial earnings call to enthuse about the Apple Vision Pro and the future of AI. "We are announcing these results on the eve of what is sure to be an historic day as we enter the era of spatial computing," he said. "Moments like these are what we live for at Apple, they're why we do what we do."

He said that this is "why we're so unflinchingly dedicated to groundbreaking innovation," and also "why we're so focused on pushing technology to its limits as we work to enrich the lives of our users."

"As we look ahead," he continued, "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."

Cook initially said nothing more than that, and it was only an implication that the news would happen during the year instead of at the end. That does fit with recent reports that Apple will make significant AI and Siri announcements at WWDC in June.

In response to questioning about AI, Cook did expand on his brief statement. "In terms of generative AI," he added, "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," he continued. "But we have got some things that we're incredibly excited about, that we'll be talking about later this year."

Perhaps the most significant element of Cook's promise of forthcoming news was how he set up that initial announcement. Apple is a technology company but also one that is very much focused on how it can "enrich the lives of our users."

Cook is saying that Apple is not leaping onto the AI bandwagon just in order to catch up with the rest of the industry. He's saying that Apple has been looking for a point for adding AI features — and that it has found it.

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29 Comments

omasou

said about 2 months ago

I love how Cook had to keep explicitly mentioning AI, ML, etc. for all of the stupid ChatGPT enamored folks that don’t understand how much AI is baked into Apple products and software and how Apple Si has AI/ML supporting GPU and Neural Engine cores have been expanding year after year.

StrangeDays

said about 2 months ago

omasou said:

I love how Cook had to keep explicitly mentioning AI, ML, etc. for all of the stupid ChatGPT enamored folks that don’t understand how much AI is baked into Apple products and software and how Apple Si has AI/ML supporting GPU and Neural Engine cores have been expanding year after year.

Right? When the folks say “But but but Apple is behind!” I’m always like…wut? Chat bots? Search engines? Letter writing wizards? Why do those things matter to anyone, let alone to Apple customers?

charlesn

said about 2 months ago

Considering how badly Apple has fumbled voice assistant technology--Siri remains, as ever, the dumbest student in the class--I have concerns about how well it will deploy advanced AI capabilities. I am all-in on Apple devices EXCEPT when it comes smart speakers and voice-controlled lights and appliances. Part of the reason is because Siri continues to be frustratingly and profoundly stupid--but mainly, it's because Alexa and Google are in everything and Siri is not. Siri debuted as an iOS app 14 years ago this month. Then Apple bought the company that developed Siri just two months later. Meanwhile, Amazon wouldn't debut Alexa for another 4.5 years--but it totally blew away Siri capabilities when it hit the market. How Apple frittered away a years-long head start in voice assistant technology is beyond me, but they did and Alexa became ubiquitous.

I think Tim said what he had to say today for the benefit of Wall Street because Apple is simply not in the conversation when it comes to AI... except to ask, "Where is Apple in all of this?" which is not the question you want raised. The lack of specifics in what he said did not inspire confidence that there are specifics to tout--I guess he's hoping to have some by WWDC in June. And you can blah, blah, blah all you want about how much AI is already in Apple products, but it doesn't change the fact that, as a company, they are not in the AI conversation like MSFT, NVDA, GOOG, META, etc.

As a creative professional--you know, a prime target market for Apple--AI is already having a profound and beneficial effect on my work flow. And none of the tools I'm currently using are connected to Apple in any way.

temperor

said about 2 months ago

charlesn said:

Considering how badly Apple has fumbled voice assistant capabilities--Siri remains, as ever, the dumbest student in the class--I have concerns about how well it will deploy advanced AI capabilities. I am all-in on Apple devices EXCEPT when it comes smart speakers and voice-controlled lights and appliances. Part of the reason is because Siri continues to be frustratingly and profoundly stupid--but mainly, it's because Alexa and Google are in everything and Siri is not.

I think Tim said what he had to say today for the benefit of Wall Street because Apple is simply not in the conversation when it comes to AI... except to ask, "Where is Apple in all of this?" which is not the question you want raised. The lack of specifics in what he said did not inspire confidence--I guess he's hoping to have some meat on the bones by WWDC in June. And you can blah, blah, blah all you want about how much AI is already in Apple products, but it doesn't change the fact that, as a company, they are not in the AI conversation like MSFT, NVDA, GOOG, META, etc.

Yeah if you look at Siri as Apple’s AI effort you are wright, except Siri was never’s Apple AI effort, it was pre AI/ML era created and still is. If you see ChatGPT as smart, well until recently it could not answer a simple reasoning question like if it take 4 hours for a towel to dry outside in the sun how long does it take to dry 20, it did 4x20, just know they programmed that out to give the correct answer … (still hard to solve by AI so they are just faking the answer)

AI euh excuse me ML is being backed into every product since 2017 from a HW perspective, and FaceID was the real visible use of AI/ML of Apple, but to name just a few things that Apple has used ML more and more. The Translate App that is really fast and completely offline supporting dozens of Languages, recognizing objects and people in photo’s you can look up in your library. All the features that people with disabilities use, are almost all based on AI/ML. The dictation tool that works way better than Siri by the way, AI/ML, The autocorrect / suggestion, finally uses AI/ML and is finally descent … Centerstage … etc etc etc … So all in all things I use daily, while I used ChatGPT in the beginning for fun, I stopped using it, the initial high and wow has gone and some meh feeling took over. Yes for coding it has potential or for some very niche use cases it could be great, replacing jobs, but do we really want to replace humans buy a chatbot …

22july2013

said about 2 months ago

All I want to know is whether Apple's version will give them access to my AI searches, (and to restrict them) or whether everything is done "on device." Is Apple going to deviate from its privacy-centric approach?