One of the most interesting stories over the past year is that Apple, the world's largest technology company, has been almost entirely silent on the single most important tech development of the past decade: generative A.I. While every other company seemed to try to find every possible way to attach the latest buzzword to every product or service, Apple hasn't even used the term.
In fact, I went back through every product announcement and public keynote since November 2022, which is when ChatGPT first launched to the public and the world became obsessed with generative A.I. I couldn't find a single example of when Apple used the words A.I., artificial intelligence, or generative A.I.
Even at WWDC, Apple's developer conference, there was little talk about A.I. Well, technically, Apple talked a lot about it, it just hasn't called any of it A.I. It refers to things like "machine learning," "neural engine," and "on-device learning," but not A.I.
Even in Apple's paper describing how it was optimizing its Core ML for Stable Diffusion, which is a generative A.I. image creation tool, the word A.I. doesn't appear a single time.
The closest Apple got was at WWDC when it explained that the new iOS keyboard includes a Transformer model that makes autocorrect far more accurate and can generate sentences as you type based on the most likely words. The point is that Apple has built features into its hardware that serve the user through its software and services.
Even when he was asked directly on a recent earnings call, Apple's CEO, Tim Cook, was reserved. "I do think it's very important to be deliberate and thoughtful in how you approach these things," Cook responded. "And there are a number of issues that need to be sorted ... but the potential is certainly very interesting."
Look, I've covered a lot of tech product events in the past year, and in every case, the thing big tech companies want to talk about the most right now is how the new A.I. feature in whatever software they make is going to change people's lives. Microsoft, for example, is betting that A.I. is the next computing platform, on par with the PC, mobile phones, and cloud computing. The company's Copilot assistant is pretty much everywhere in Windows and Microsoft 365.
Sure, in a lot of cases, the A.I. buzz is mostly just marketing hype, but there are a few notable and useful examples.
Now, however, it appears Apple is starting to think differently about A.I. Or, at least, it's talking differently about it. With the M3, the company says that "the Neural Engine is up to 60 percent faster than in the M1 family of chips, making A.I./ML workflows even faster while keeping data on device to preserve privacy."
Apple even went as far as to highlight that the increased memory capacity on the M3 Max supports "workflows previously not possible on a laptop, such as A.I. developers working with even larger transformer models with billions of parameters."
Apple isn't just talking about the features it builds into its own products that take advantage of its own capabilities but is also explicitly positioning its new MacBook Pros as a tool for developers building A.I. products. That's a pretty significant change.
I think there are a couple of reasons this is happening now. First, Apple is nothing if not methodical. It plans its product roadmap far in advance, and it doesn't make changes just because of trends in the tech industry. If Apple is going to talk about something, it's always going to be because it believes it has something to offer in that area, not just to ride along the latest wave.
This leads to the other reason--Apple finally has chips that make sense to talk about it. Assuming Apple's claims are true, the M3 family of processors are a real improvement over even the M2. And Apple is making them available in a laptop with enough performance and memory for developers to do things they couldn't before.
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