Apple has been jumping on the bandwagon lately by saying that it is getting into AI, but now it is actually claiming that it is already there – it is just so subtle no-one has noticed.
Apple’s Stephen Levy told Backchannel that artificial intelligence isn’t the "final frontier" for tech products "despite what other companies say" because Apple has been using it for years and got the teeshirt to prove it.
He said that the perception that Apple is behind the game is incorrect. OK, Amazon might have Alexa, Facebook has its chatbooks, Microsoft has its conversational computing and Google has Allo.
Let us be clear about this. Apple doesn't have a dedicated AI division, it doesn't publish research and it has promised not to use its user data to train its machine learning systems. But it does have Siri, which is fairly erratic but according to Levy it is working on it.
In 2014, Apple moved Siri's voice recognition onto a system based on neural networks, but that the iPhone-maker didn't publicize it as it didn't want to signal its intentions to competitors. Since then, writes Levy, Apple has been slowly layering AI and deep learning into more and more of its products.
Levy said: “If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve come across Apple’s AI, and not just in Siri’s improved acumen in figuring out what you ask of her. You see it when the phone identifies a caller who isn’t in your contact list (but did email you recently). Or when you swipe on your screen to get a shortlist of the apps that you are most likely to open next. Or when you get a reminder of an appointment that you never got around to putting into your calendar. Or when a map location pops up for the hotel you’ve reserved, before you type it in. Or when the phone points you to where you parked your car, even though you never asked it to. These are all techniques either made possible or greatly enhanced by Apple’s adoption of deep learning and neural nets.”
So basically Apple's argument is that you’ve been using AI on your iPhone already. Apple is still cool, go back to bed Apple fanboys Jobs’ Mob is really still the king of innovation. Levy notes that even the palm rejection feature on the Apple Pencil was trained using a machine learning model – so even the pencil has AI.
Apparently the reason we don’t know that Apple is the coolest AI expert in the world, or that all this AI is powering your iPhone is because Jobs’ Mob wants to keep it all secret. So you can expect stories from the Tame Apple Press to appear saying “Apple is the tops in AI, but shush it is a secret”.
After all journalists are supposed to believe any rubbish a technology PR unit throws at them.
