Here's what Apple is preparing in AI to challenge Google and Samsung (and not lag behind)

TL;DR:

• 2024 and 2025 should bless the upcoming iPhones with AI goodies.
• Apple is way behind in the AI race and the competition is acting on it.
• Google has already upped the ante, and Samsung will double down with the “Galaxy AI” in days.

Welcome to today’s obligatory, inevitable, inescapable Two Minute AI.

We’re going to talk about Apple’s plan on how not to lose the (mobile) AI race, which, so far, is not winning or leading. In fact, it’s lagging behind.

I’m not the only one saying that Cupertino is way behind in AI than the competition – “way behind” is the exact expression from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his latest ‘Power On’ newsletter.

In it, he makes the case that Apple’s toughest trials and tribulations in 2024 will not have the iPhone at the center. Nor will the Vision Pro be a major ‘headache’ for Apple – maybe just a minor one, as the $3500 price will not make this a hot-selling product all over the world right away.

The trials and tribulations of Apple in 2024

In the digital jungle, Apple is a leader alright; just not a typical one – for example, we’re yet to get a foldable phone or a tablet from Apple. The philosophy behind Cupertino’s patience seems to be “Learn from the mistakes of – Samsung and Google, ahem – others”. When the time is right, Apple will most definitely enter the foldable realm.

Speaking of Samsung and Google, Apple has a long way to go to catch up with those two in terms of AI capabilities. Personally, you may be the type of user who couldn’t care less about AI in your handset, but letting the competition offer something you don’t is a no-no in the big business world.

That’s why Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman is expressing the sentiment of many – Apple has quite the miss on its record, given that nearly two years have passed since ChatGPT captured several billion people’s attention, almost a year after Amazon announced its revamped and AI-boosted Alexa service and about a year and a half after Microsoft and Google debuted their new AI-related services.

In mid-January, Samsung is expected to unveil the Galaxy S24 line and – for those of you who have been living under a rock these past few months – it’s dubbed ‘Galaxy AI’, which is self-explanatory on what we’re going to get from Korea’s latest flagships.

What is Apple going to do?

The name of the game may be “Keep up, not catch up”, but right now, Apple has some catching up to do.

As the newsletter has it, Apple is “eyeing adding features like auto-summarizing and auto-complete” to its core apps and productivity software such as Pages and Keynote. Apple is also working to slap AI into services like Apple Music, where the company wants to use the technology to better automate playlist creation. “And Apple is planning a big overhaul to its digital assistant, Siri”, says Gurman.

These are probably to be expected in iOS 18 and the underlying work is being done “on a large language model dubbed Ajax internally and the company has been testing it since early last year”:



According to the newsletter, “the totality of Apple’s generative AI vision” will take at least into 2025 to fully scale. “Long story short: Apple is way behind in AI and it’s a major risk for a company that considers itself the top innovator in consumer technology”, Gurman concludes.