Apple Just Teased Its AI Plans. You Really Should Take Notice

Stay tuned: 2024 will be the year Apple finally reveals what it has up its sleeve regarding generative AI. On the company's quarterly earnings call Thursday afternoon, CEO Tim Cook cited "a huge opportunity for Apple with gen AI and AI." 

In the call, Cook said Apple "has some things that we're incredibly excited about that we'll be talking about later this year."

He was otherwise tight-lipped, beyond citing how AI powers the Apple Vision Pro headset, which went on sale Friday and which CNET reviewer Scott Stein calls "Apple's wildest and strangest device." Cook argued that Apple can justify the Vision Pro's $3,499 price point due to the 5,000 patents it holds, alongside "many innovations that Apple has spent multiple years on, from silicon to displays, and in significant AI and machine learning—all of the hand tracking, the room mapping—all of this stuff is driven by AI."

We should point out that AI is a broad field of technology, with applications in everything from sorting through photos for familiar faces to assisting you as you type out texts. Machine learning is another aspect: how computers can essentially teach themselves by working through large datasets, rather than relying on coding written by humans. 

Generative AI, made popular by OpenAI's ChatGPT, involves chatbots generating often very humanlike responses to prompts, such as asking for an essay on a famous author or for travel plans to Morocco.

Reports emerged last July that Apple was working on an AI chatbot called Apple GPT and a large language model called Ajax, but the company didn't comment at the time.

"We have a lot of work going on internally, as I've alluded to before," Cook said of generative AI during Thursday's call. "Our M.O., if you will, has always been to do work and then talk about work, and not to get out in front of ourselves, so we're going to hold that to this as well."

Apple so far has been conspicuously absent from the generative AI frenzy that's engulfed Big Tech. Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and others have spent the last year fine-tuning their chatbots as they vie for market share. But it's very much on brand for Apple to take its time prior to entering a new product category—and to subsequently transform that space completely. Look no further than products like the iPhone and the iPad.

With 2.2 billion active devices, Apple has an opportunity to reach plenty of users, and to then keep them in its ecosystem.

However, until Apple is ready to make its announcement—perhaps at its Worldwide Developers Conference in June?—the only other detail we know is that the company is spending money to make things happen.

"We are making all the investments that are necessary throughout our product development, software development, services development," CFO Luca Maestri said in response to an analyst question about AI. "And we're very excited about what's in store for us for the rest of the year."

Editors' note: CNET is using an AI engine to help create some stories. For more, see this post.