Apple Aims To Make It Big In The AI Sector With Lower Costs Than Rivals

It’s no secret that the race is heating up in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector, with businesses across all industries looking to adopt process-streamlining and productivity-enhancing generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools.

In this scramble, technology conglomerates are striving to ensure they provide their customers with the latest tools and capabilities and do not lose out to competitors.

However, one large technology company has yet to enter the AI arena; Apple.

While the world’s second largest company by market capitalization has yet to make significant moves in the AI field, it has signaled its intent to enter the industry in a big way with some major moves and its usual signature brand of creativity.

So, what moves does Apple plan to make in the AI sector? Let’s explore!
 

What Is Apple’s Plan?

 

• Recently, we reported on a few ideas that Apple is believed to be looking toward to enhance its AI position, which included partnerships with other leading AI companies to boost its efforts, research papers on AI tools and server cost-cutting AI models.

• On the other hand, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has been answering questions for over a year and a half about the company’s lack of an AI position, which took a turn after the company’s quarterly earnings call, where Cook conveyed that the company would reveal stronger details soon.

• Talking about the company’s $100 billion spent on research and development over the past five years Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, said, “We continue to feel very bullish about our opportunity in generative AI and we're making significant investments.”

• Ahead of this, reports find that the company is waiting to make its move at the right time.

• Some of these moves include partnering with OpenAI and Google to power some of its AI features.

• Apple has also been engulfed in numerous AI research papers, which may help shape a better understanding of where the company is heading in the field.

• Among a range of research papers sits Apple’s “LLM in a flash: Efficient Large Language Model Inference with Limited Memory” paper, which aims to tackle “the challenge of efficiently running LLMs that exceed the available DRAM capacity by storing the model parameters in flash memory, but bringing them on demand to DRAM.”

• Essentially, this means Apple is looking to build an AI model that can be stored on a device’s SSD instead of its RAM, resulting in faster and more efficiently running models.

• “We have demonstrated the ability to run LLMs up to twice the size of available DRAM, achieving an acceleration in inference speed by 4-5x compared to traditional loading methods in CPU, and 20-25x in GPU. This innovation is particularly crucial for deploying advanced LLMs in resource-limited environments, thereby expanding their applicability and accessibility,” reads the research paper.

• Apple’s “EELBERT: Tiny Models through Dynamic Embeddings” paper can help it deploy significantly smaller LLMs without massive quality dents.

• LLMs will also help enhance Apple’s Siri (Apple’s voice-activated digital assistant), which is being enhanced by bringing in a new operation method that wouldn’t require a “wake word”. “This problem is significantly more challenging than voice trigger detection, since there might not be a leading trigger phrase that marks the beginning of a voice command,” read the paper.

• Instead, it will identify when a user is talking to it, for which another group of researchers worked upon furthering the accuracy of wake words, while others trained a model to understand rare words.

• This was followed by another paper highlighting STEER (Semantic Turn Extension-Expansion Recognition), which focuses on improving communication between the assistant and a user.

• Ahead of this, the company had published research papers that were aimed at enabling image generation, image editing, audio editing, audio track splitting and more.

While Apple hasn’t come out as a dominant force in the AI sector, the company has invested time, effort, resources and money to position itself as a power-hitter preparing a grand entrance.

Do you think Apple will be able to build a strong position in the AI market, despite its late entry to the sector?

Let us know in the comments below!