38: Where Is Apple in the AI Race?

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On this week's episode of The MacRumors Show, we discuss Apple's place in the ongoing race to develop generative AI tools.

Earlier this week, Apple held its annual AI summit for employees at the Steve Jobs Theater, the first fully live in-person event at the company's Apple Park headquarters since the pre-COVID era. The latest AI summit comes at a time of great excitement surrounding the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot and Google's recent announcement that it is releasing its own LaMDA-powered AI chatbot, called Bard.

Google is adding the technology behind Bard to the Google search engine to enable complex queries to be distilled into digestible answers, and Microsoft is expected to follow a similar path by integrating ChatGPT into Bing Search. AI image generation tools such as DALL-E 2 have also captured public interest in recent months, alongside the technology's potential for music creation, video editing, and more.

In February last year, Apple purchased an AI start-up focused on auto-generated music, but the company is publicly missing from the current race to innovate in the generative AI space. We look at where Apple may have advantages that it could leverage for AI, potential integrations in features like Siri and Spotlight search, and where we could see the first Apple generative AI tools emerge.

We also talk through some of the week's biggest news, including the apparent delay of Apple's mixed-reality headset to June, the indefinite delay of the company's 27-inch mini-LED external display, iMac skipping the M2 chip, and the method Apple apparently has in store to authenticate iPhone 15 USB-C accessories. In addition, we look at the increasingly tangible 15-inch MacBook Air with the M2 chip, which Apple could launch as soon as April.

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