Apple to Infuse Generative AI Features Into Multiple Products

A series of job listings posted by the tech mogul suggests Apple is getting more serious about AI adoption.

Apple is “working on a generative AI-based developer experience platform for internal use,” one of the App Store listings read. Another job posting targets professionals familiar with “long-form text generation, summarization, [and] question-answering” to work on a customer-focused conversational voice and chat AI platform.

Other job openings related to AI include working with large language models and generative AI, with several positions in machine learning and natural language generative modeling. Job descriptions suggest that Siri, Photos, Music, and various other services will be receiving an AI upgrade.

According to Mark Gurman’s Bloomberg report, the company’s senior vice presidents in charge of AI and software engineering, John Giannandrea and Craig Federighi, and Apple’s head of services, Eddy Cue, intend to spend about $1 billion on finding innovative ways to apply generative AI across Apple’s products.

Giannandrea’s team is currently working on developing a new AI system and advancing Apple’s digital assistant Siri. Federighi’s software engineers, meanwhile, are implementing generative AI features that should improve the way Siri and the Messages app answer questions and auto-complete sentences in the next iOS update.

The engineering team is also working on adding generative AI capabilities into development tools like Xcode to enable faster application development. This feature is similar to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot, which can auto-complete code.

Cue’s group is in charge of infusing generative AI into apps. Similar to the generative AI features Microsoft launched in Word and PowerPoint, Cue’s team is exploring ways to infuse AI into apps like Pages and Keynote.

This group is also working on supercharging Apple Music with auto-generated playlists. Spotify introduced a similar feature earlier this year in partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Apple has built its own large language model (LLM) Ajax and developed a chatbot, Apple GPT, to test its functionality internally, but hasn’t deployed it yet. So far, Apple’s only notable AI release is an improved autocorrect feature on iOS 17.

According to a source familiar with Apple, the company feels like it’s lagging behind tech peers in AI adoption and considers it “a pretty big miss internally.”