Introducing Apple AI

As far as I can remember, Apple has never been the first to market on any of their product - iPod, iPhone, Apple Watch, Air Tags, Vision Pro, even the Mac to a degree. Instead, Apple likes to hold, sit back, observe and wait for the market to mature before coming out with the best version you can imagine of a Product. Call it their M.O., product strategy, long term planning, whatever - they have used this playbook often and it has paid huge dividends to the company. A market cap of $2.95 Trillion as of Friday May 31, 2024.

While the world has been blown away after OpenAI introduced ChatGPT; it seems that Apple has been caught off guard and is rushing to get a leg up in the AI game. Or is it simply observing?

Since the introduction of CharGPT, we now have Gemini, Claude, and several other chatbots, every major tech company and startup has an LLM being trained on billions of parameter and almost every SaaS application now has a “copilot“ that can help you with several trivial tasks. Even Notion’s AI helped me generate some of these words!

But some major excitement “was” created by Humane’s AI pin and Rabbit’s R1. At first I was genuinely excited about these new gadgets; however, the reviews have had a similar theme — what can these device do that my phone can’t?

Humane is now looking for a buyer, and despite the founders claim that R1 would get an amazing review from Marques Brownlee; which didn’t go very well. It looks like the best device to have AI is the one that’s always with you; your phone.

I have now cancelled my Rabbit R1 order which hasn’t shipped for the past 5 months.

Apple’s WWDC is next week; and there have been obvious speculations about AI making a debut on the iPhone. Both OpenAI and Google are in advance talks to have a partnership/integration with their models on the iPhone; with the former confirming a deal with Apple.

This partnership goes both ways; Apple gets a powerful integration and a lot of money; while OpenAI gets to train their model even further when users interact with it.

Has Apple observed enough? AI is progressing at a furious pace and maybe Apple has the answer it was looking for. At WWDC 2024, I don’t expect to see a major integration with the Apple ecosystem, but probably a primer. Give it time and you will see deeper, stronger integration on each platform and major updates to developer tools with API, LLM models available for your apps.

One thing I’m optimistic is that you will have a reason to upgrade your phone moving forward.

#Long #AAPL