Apple is preparing to enter the AI ​​race late with the ambition to overtake the early leaders

Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference on Monday is expected to herald the company’s move into generative artificial intelligence, marking its late arrival at a technological frontier that is expected to be as revolutionary as the invention of iPhone.

The highly anticipated display of the AI ​​that will be integrated into the iPhone and other Apple products will be the highlight of an event that traditionally previews the next version of the software that powers Apple’s hardware lineup. ‘business.

And Apple’s next generation of software is expected to come with an array of AI features that could make its often clunky virtual assistant Siri smarter, and make photos, music, text messages — and maybe even be creating emojis on the fly – more productive and productive. entertaining experience.

True to its secretive nature, Apple has not provided any advance details about Monday’s event which will be held at the company’s headquarters in Cupertino, California.

But CEO Tim Cook has hinted in the first few months that Apple was close to revealing its big plans to enter a space that has fueled an industrial boom over the past 18 months.

The AI ​​craze is the main reason why Nvidia, the dominant maker of the chips that underpin this technology, has seen its market value soar from around $300 billion at the end of 2022 to around $3 trillion. That meteoric run helped Nvidia briefly overtake Apple last week as the second-most valuable company in the United States. Microsoft earlier this year also eclipsed the iPhone maker thanks to its so-far successful push into AI.

But analysts are increasingly concerned that Apple is too far behind in the rapidly evolving AI field, a concern that has been compounded by an unusually prolonged decline in the company’s sales. Google and Samsung have already released smartphone models featuring AI features as their main attractions.

That’s why analysts such as Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities view Monday’s conference as a potential springboard that will propel Apple into a new phase of robust growth. Ives estimates that infusing more AI into iPhone, iPad and Mac computers will result in an additional $450 billion to $600 billion in market value for Apple.

Monday’s conference “represents the most important event for Apple in more than a decade, as the push to deliver a generative AI technology stack to developers and consumers is at the forefront,” Ives wrote in a note of research.

Apple could certainly use the boost that AI could provide, especially for its 13-year-old Siri assistant, which Forrester Research’s Dipanjan Chatterjee now calls a “strangely useless assistant.”

Meanwhile, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is becoming increasingly conversational – so much so that it recently sparked accusations of intentional copying of AI software voiced by Scarlett Johansson – and Google last month previewed of an AI “agent” nicknamed Astra who can apparently see and remember things.

In addition to using AI to improve Siri, Apple may also partner with OpenAI to bring some elements of ChatGPT to the iPhone, according to a wide range of unconfirmed reports leading up to Monday’s conference.

This will be the second year in a row that Apple has made a splash at its developers conference by using it to usher in its entry into a trendy form of technology that other companies had already made inroads into.

Last year, Apple gave a first look at its mixed reality headset, the Vision Pro, which only launched earlier this year, priced at $3,500, which posed a major hurdle to conquer the market. Still, Apple’s push into mixed reality, tweaked with a twist it calls “spatial computing,” has raised hopes that what is currently a niche technology will turn into a huge market.

Part of that optimism comes from the fact that Apple released technologies later than others, then used sleek designs and services combined with slick marketing campaigns to overcome its late start and unleash new trends.

“Apple’s early reluctance toward AI was entirely due to branding,” Forrester’s Chatterjee wrote in a developer conference preview. “The company has always been obsessed with what its offerings did for its customers rather than how it did it.”

Introducing more AI into the iPhone, in particular, will likely raise privacy concerns – a topic Apple has gone to great lengths to assure its loyal customer base that it can be trusted not to pry too much into. deeply into their personal lives.

One way for Apple to reassure consumers that the iPhone won’t be used to spy on them is to leverage its own chip technology so that most AI-based features are handled on the device itself. even rather than on remote data centers, often called “the cloud”. Going this route would also help protect Apple’s profit margins, as AI technology through the cloud is much more expensive than when run solely on a device.