Apple readies AI tool to help you code iOS apps, while Google presents turbocharged Gemini 1.5

Welcome to today’s obligatory, inevitable, inescapable Two Minute AI. Just joking – that’s far from the last time you’ll be hearing about AI today (or on any given day in the near future).

Apple, which is way behind the rest of the gang in the AI race, is reportedly set to introduce an artificial intelligence tool designed to assist in software development by auto-completing lines of code, akin to Microsoft's Copilot (via Reuters).

This feature is expected to be incorporated into Apple's Xcode development software possibly within the year. Xcode is Apple’s IDE (Integrated Development Environment), designed for creating software on Mac for various Apple platforms, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS.

While Xcode is provided free to developers, Apple imposes a $99 annual fee for app submissions to its app stores. Additionally, Apple is exploring further AI integrations, including automated creation of Apple Music playlists and business presentation slide decks, as well as an enhanced "Spotlight" search function capable of deeper app interactions.

What about Google?

Meanwhile, Google is not letting go of the plan to eclipse ChatGPT as the go-to AI solution. The search engine giant has just presented Gemini 1.5 Pro that’s said to be so much more powerful than the Gemini 1.0 Pro. The Gemini Pro is Google’s general-purpose AI model (via The Verge) and the new 1.5 Version bested Gemini 1.0 Pro on “87% of benchmark tests”.

On a side note: Sam Altman’s prodigy platform is not sitting idle. OpenAI seeks ways to pull the plug on Google and occupy its search engine throne, as we reported mere hours ago.

Back to the new Gemini 1.5 Pro: what got Google CEO Sundar Pichai and the rest of the team extremely excited was the updated model’s “enormous context window”. This means that the Gemini 1.5 Pro can handle “much larger queries”, meaning it can check much more information at once.

“That window is a whopping 1 million tokens, compared to 128,000 for OpenAI’s GPT-4 and 32,000 for the current Gemini Pro”, the report reads and continues, stating that 1 million tokens are equal to “about 10 or 11 hours of video, tens of thousands of lines of code”, as Sundar Pichai explained. The context window means you can ask the AI bot about all of that content at once.

Google’s CEO has another idea for the new model (it’s now available to developers and enterprise users ahead of a full consumer rollout coming soon) and imagines movie directors and producers who could upload their entire movie and ask Gemini what reviewers might say; he sees companies using Gemini to look over masses of financial records. “I view it as one of the bigger breakthroughs we have done”, he says.

We might feed the Gemini 1.5 Pro model news from the last 10 years and see if things really started going south after that Harambe gorilla killing in May 2016. It will be an interesting analysis!