MP079 - 3 Unexpected Reasons Apple Excels in AI
Teaser
Contrary to popular belief, Apple is extremely well positioned with regard to the AI race. In this episode, I will cover three reasons why, and the last one might even surprise you.
I'll unpack all of this after the intro..
Welcome
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AI @ Apple
So let's talk about Apple, which for many people is falling behind when it comes to AI, and I would say that I, I disagree with that, and I will explain why.
Apple is a hardware company
So first, let's remember that Apple is first and foremost a hardware company, and so if you look at Apple's history when they released the Macintosh, it was piggybacking on the invention of the microprocessor.
And another revolution from Apple was the iPhone, and the iPhone leveraged good enough mobile broadband speeds, and also capacitive touch technology.
And so I'm not surprised that people think that Apple is behind because they don't see a software or a service like ChatGPT, but Apple is a hardware company.
The 2 types of AI
And let's remember that, there are actually two types of AI technologies.
So if you remember when I introduced AI back in episode 68, I talked about those that process stuff. and AI that generates stuff.
Those that generate stuff, this is where the generative AI word is coming from, but before November 2022, the vast majority of AI solutions were processing kind of AI.
And on that front, Apple is actually ahead of everybody else, both hardware-wise and software-wise.
Processing AI on Apple hardware
On the hardware side of things, since the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X that were released in two thousand and seventeen, the iPhone has a neural engine chip.
So it's a processor that is solely dedicated to running machine learning algorithms directly on device.
And since the iPhone 12 that was released in 2020, the iPhone has more neural engine cores than if you combine the CPU and the GPU cores together.
On the Mac side, with the release of the M1 chip, so the first Apple Silicon processor in 2020. Same thing. The Macs have at least 16 neural engine cores, the same as the latest, iPhone and iPad.
Because of that, the iPhone and the Mac are today the best consumer platforms to run AI models and machine learning algorithms locally on the device.
Processing AI with Apple software
On the software side of things, Apple has been offering predictive text, voice recognition, fall and crash detection, atrial fibrillation detection from the Apple Watch.
If you've been using the Photos app on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac. You can search for people, for objects, for houses, for animals.
All of that is using machine learning, on device processing, using artificial intelligence.
Lately, Apple has released the option to create a sticker. directly from an image. This is done through AI. You can extract text from images and videos. Same thing.
The only exception today is still Siri, because it's leveraging a very old database-like technology that was developed before the neural engine was even a thing.
So it doesn't use machine learning the same way that the other features that Apple has released.
So I'm hopeful that Apple will change or rewrite Siri to use more modern AI capabilities. And when that will be done, then Siri will really be much better than what it is today.
AI is behind on Generative AI
On the generative AI side, yes, I agree, Apple is behind.
The only Generative AI feature that Apple has released with iOS 17 and macOS 14 was personal voice.
And even that, I've tried, it's, it's not easy.
You have to spend, I remember now, 20 or 30 minutes. And you have to, read out loud a bunch of sentences, and then, you need to plug your iPhone so that it's charging, and then overnight, it will create a clone of your voice.
But it's worse than that, because even after that, I tried. So you can then type, you type some text, and then it supposedly speaks, converts that into speech in your own voice, and I don't know, maybe because my accent is not perfect, but I could tell that it was very low quality.
If I compare that to Descript, for instance, Descript is much, much better quality than Apple Personal Voice.
So yes, Apple is behind in generative AI technologies.
There is still no official announcement for capabilities similar to Microsoft 365 Copilot. or Duet AI for Google Workspace.
So the idea here would be to use AI to help with tasks inside Keynote, Pages, Numbers, Mail, Contacts, Calendar.
In Keynote, for instance, you could create a first draft based on a prompt and then using image generation, AI, you could add images.
You could imagine that using your voice, you could ask AI in macOS to take the contact information at the bottom of an email and then create a contact for you in the Contacts app and you wouldn't need to type anything.
So these kind of things, these capabilities, they don't exist yet in macOS or iOS.
Now the folks who created Workflow for iOS, which was bought later by Apple and then renamed Shortcuts, well, these folks, they have left Apple and now they are building AI solutions to actually do that, to automate tasks directly on our Mac.
It's a little bit like what HyperWrite is developing, and same thing, I can't wait to see what these guys will do on the AI automation inside macOS.
AI research @ Apple
Now, even though Apple has yet to release more generative AI features, they are not standing still.
Not only is Apple investing a lot in AI and machine learning research, they are publishing papers and releasing open source software too.
So the first one I found is called Ferret. It's a multi modal, large language model that can deeply understand the content of images and also how one part of the image relates to another one.
You can draw multiple regions on an image, then you can ask whether those regions refer to the same object or not.
And if the image contains food ingredients, you could ask Ferret what dish you could prepare with those ingredients. It's really fascinating, it's still in research now, and, hopefully this kind of technology will be included in future iOS and macOS versions.
The second one I found is called Hugs, and it's actually a video generation AI model that can animate a 3D avatar of a person based only on a few seconds of video.
So one of the examples that they show is a video of a person walking, then turning around, lifting her arms. And this video lasts 20 seconds or so.
But using this very short clip as the training material, the Hugs model was able to recreate a 3D avatar of that person and make that avatar dance and move however, we want and wherever we want.
In one video, there were three AI avatars performing the same Irish dance routine in front of a statue, and it really seems ultra realistic.
Confident about AI @ Apple
So all of this combined, makes me believe that Apple is quietly working on Generative AI capabilities and will release something when they feel it will bring some value to their customers.
And then once it will be available, I'm sure it will seamlessly work on all our Apple devices.
Recap
To recap, I've shared with you the main reasons why I believe that Apple hasn't missed the AI train at all, and how it has positioned itself to offer amazing generative AI capabilities in the future.
If you found this episode useful, I'd be super grateful if you could share it, and if you do that on Instagram, you can tag me, my handle is @MacpreneurFM.
Next and outro
In the next episode, I will kick off Season 4, which will be all about improving the efficiency of your solopreneur business processes. I can't wait to help you with that.
So that's it for today. If you haven't done it yet, visit macpreneur.com/AI to grab your own copy of the top 10 AI tools cheat sheet.
This PDF will give you the edge that you need to boost your solo business in this fast-paced world. Once again, it's macpreneur.com/AI.
And until next time, I'm Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.