Apple lagging behind in AI race

Apple's modest AI updates announced on June 10 did little to shake the sense that the iPhone maker is still finding its footing in AI as rivals charge ahead, Report informs via Axios.

AI is widely seen as the largest technology shift in decades and could easily serve as an inflection point where existing leaders are dethroned and new ones crowned.

One year after unveiling an expansive vision for personalized AI that it has largely failed to deliver, the iPhone maker focused on a smaller set of tweaks and enhancements to Apple Intelligence.

Some announcements from Monday, such as live translation, are useful additions already offered on rival devices from Google, Samsung and Microsoft.

In a handful of other areas, such as image generation, Apple is improving its offering by drawing more heavily on its partnership with OpenAI.

ChatGPT already handles Apple Intelligence features that require more world knowledge than is available from Apple's smaller, locally run models.

Apple's most significant AI move was to allow developers to make use of Apple's own models, including a 3 billion-parameter model that runs on Apple devices and a larger one that runs via Apple's servers.

The list of things Apple left unsaid looms larger than the improvements they did announce.

The company didn't expand — or even really elaborate — on the vision it laid out last year where Apple takes advantage of all that it knows about its individual users to answer questions in a privacy-friendly way.

Nor did Apple announce rumored deals with Google or Perplexity to serve as additional third-party engines for Apple Intelligence.

Most glaringly, the company didn't offer a concrete timeline for the improved Siri originally promised last year. Apple's Craig Federighi said only that Apple would have more to say about the delayed feature within the coming year.