After tidbits of the upcoming iPhone 16 series, analyst Jeff Pu says iOS 18 could finally add generative AI features for the iPhone in late 2024. The note from Haitong International Securities analyst was seen by MacRumors and suggests Apple is building a few hundred AI servers in 2023 and even more next year.
By combining cloud-based AI and on-device data processing, Apple would finally roll out its generative AI to iPhone and iPad users by late 2024, which means this would be part of the iOS 18 cycle.
This note comes after a few other reports about Apple’s future GPT. Last month, The Information shared that Cupertino is spending millions of dollars daily to train its large-language models – LLM for short.
While the publication said most of this investment would focus on AppleCare customers, the Siri team plans to incorporate these language models to make complex shortcut integrations much more accessible.
What’s interesting about this story is that people on the Apple team believe its most advanced language model, Ajax GPT, which Bloomberg already reported, might be better than OpenAI’s GPT. 3.5. Even though the other company is already working on better solutions, it’s good to know that Apple has dramatically improved in the conversational AI field.
The roadblock for Cupertino is that the company prefers to run software on devices that improve privacy and performance. At the same time, it’s impossible to deliver the best language-learning model without being cloud-based, which could now change with iOS 18.
The Information reported: “Ajax GPT, for example, has been trained on more than 200 billion parameters, as they’re known in AI parlance. (…) Parameters reflect the size and complexity of a machine-learning model; a higher number of parameters indicates greater complexity and requires more storage space and computing power. An LLM with more than 200 billion parameters couldn’t reasonably fit on an iPhone.”
That said, Apple could be working to bring that to the iPhone and iPad with iOS 18 at the end of next year.
BGR will keep reporting on Apple’s AI efforts, especially now that we have a timeframe for how it will tackle OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing, and Google Bard.
