The huge success of ChatGPT last year took everyone by surprise, with many tech companies scrambling to quickly integrate artificial intelligence into their best-selling products

Apple was a bit late out of the gate on this, but CEO Tim Cook has promised that the company will "break new ground in generative AI" this year

The specifics of the "what" are, of course, being kept under wraps, but the "how" is a bit clearer Apple reportedly acquired more than 30 AI startups in 2023 and appears to be continuing the trend with its acquisition of Canadian company DarwinAI in 2024

According to Bloomberg, which revealed the acquisition, DarwinAI is responsible for technology that visually inspects parts in manufacturing, but Apple may be interested in working to make AI systems "smaller and faster" This may be important, as Apple reportedly intends to run the iPhone 16's AI functions locally rather than in the cloud

The report added that the acquisition was completed earlier this year, and while Apple neither confirmed nor denied the report, the company admitted to Bloomberg that it "occasionally acquires smaller technology companies" More importantly, DarwinAI's web footprint has disappeared, and founder Alexander Wong's LinkedIn profile states that he became "Director of Machine Learning Research" at Apple in January

In a few months, WWDC 2024 should see the first fruits of Apple's pivot to artificial intelligence The World Developer Conference is usually the place where Apple unveils beta versions of its latest operating system, and there is reportedly a "directive" within the company that iOS 18 will be chock-full of "features that work on the company's massive language model"

Early rumors suggest the ability for Siri to summarize content and answer questions in ChatGPT style, iMessage, and even AI integration with AppleCare developers attending WWDC will be able to see Apple's generative AI for building apps tools for building apps may be particularly interested in reports that a release of such tools is also forthcoming

While Apple tends to make new versions of iOS backward compatible with a laudable number of older devices, some of the upcoming iPhone AI features will likely be iPhone-specific when the iPhone 16 arrives

Apple's A-series iPhone chips have included a Neural Engine for machine learning since the iPhone 8's A11 Bionic processor, and the field of artificial intelligence has advanced significantly since that chip was developed in 2017 Viewed through that lens, it may be telling that the iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Pro may again use the same chipset Perhaps the best on-device AI capabilities will require a significant hardware boost and chip parity will once again be the norm