CUPERTINO, California — Apple announced a slew of artificial intelligence features across its software and services and said it will open up the underlying technology it uses for Apple Intelligence, laying groundwork for future advances.
The tone and content of the presentations at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference focused more on incremental developments, including live translations for phone calls and design changes to its operating systems, that improve everyday life rather than the sweeping ambitions for AI that Apple’s rivals are marketing.
Apple software chief Craig Federighi said the company is opening up the foundational AI model that it uses for some of its own features to third-party developers.
“This work needed more time to reach our high-quality bar,” Federighi, senior vice president of software engineering, said of the delays of some features such as improvements to the Siri virtual assistant.
In an early demonstration of how partners could improve Apple apps, the company added image generation from OpenAI’s ChatGPT to its Image Playground app, saying that user data would not be shared with OpenAI without a user’s permission.
“In a moment in which the market questions Apple’s ability to take any sort of lead in the AI space, the announced features felt incremental at best,” Thomas Monteiro, senior analyst at Investing.com, said according to Reuters.
Compared with what other big AI companies are introducing, he added, “It just seems that the clock is ticking faster every day for Apple.”
While Apple shied away from making big promises of AI improvements for consumers, small touches behind the scenes such as allowing developers to use ChatGPT’s code generation tools in its XCode tools, which are required to make apps for Macs and iPhones, showed the company trying to keep pace with what its rivals are offering to software developers.
