Next year’s big iPhone software update is when we are likely to see Apple take big strides into the world of generative AI, with the release of iOS 18.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman said Apple is “racing to catch up with Google and OpenAI” and the next major version of Apple’s software will bring this form of AI to iPhones. He suggested that the next generation of iPhones will not have dramatic hardware upgrades.
While we don't know much about what the AI will be like to use, Apple already has the perfect vehicle for an AI interface, Siri. So, we may well see a new revised version of Siri at the core of this Apple AI revolution, one made using the large language model (LLM) tech behind chatbots like ChatGPT.
Apple has reportedly been working on the technology for years and its chatbot software is known internally as Ajax. This will bring us closer to the sci-fi movie scenario of a digital assistant that can behave largely like an actual person.
According to the Information, Apple has been spending millions of dollars a day on its AI tech, or around a billion dollars a year, according to Bloomberg.
What will the iPhone 16's AI do?
There are suggestions AI will be used to generate playlists in Apple Music, to help out when writing documents in Apple Pages or to create slides in Keynote, much like Microsoft’s 365 CoPilot implementations in the company’s Office apps.
However, development is not going without a hitch, said Gurman. He claims Apple temporarily froze the development of new features in the project earlier this month because the “quality of initial versions missed the mark". The development team was told to focus on fixing bugs and glitches, which raises the question of whether Apple has enough time to get such a revolutionary change to the iPhone’s software ready in time for the iPhone 16 launch.
The main iPhone models have been announced in September, or occasionally October, ever since the iPhone 5 in 2012. Adding bold new forms of AI is unlikely to alter that schedule.
Gurman says one debate is whether the iPhone’s AI should happen all on-device or if it should be allowed to offload some of its work to the cloud.
An all-on-device approach is better for privacy but, as seen in the parallel development of Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant, making privacy less of a priority can result in a more advanced-seeming digital companion.
The iPhone 15 has features that might be considered AI but they are much subtler than the headline-grabbing generative AI of chatbots. For example, voicemails can be automatically transcribed, iOS 17 can recognise specific pets as well as people and, creepiest of the lot, can create a digital version of a person’s voice using Personal Voice.
