Apple's Al future could be a lot brighter than it seems

As always, Apple is biding its time-but time is running out

- JASON SNELL

Everyone wants to talk about Al. Most of them don't know what it is (artificial intelligence), but they still want to talk about it. Who's got it and who doesn't. What industries it's ripe to disrupt. And the one company that's not in the middle of that conversation is Apple.

Viral images generated by Stable Diffusion and pathological chatbots from OpenAl, Microsoft, and Google are the story of the day. Apple, meanwhile, has nothing. Or perhaps, considering the current state of Siri (fave.co/3MUHveW), less than nothing. Apple's nowhere when it comes to Al. That's the narrative. The thing is, that narrative is not true. At least, it's not true yet.

PRESENTING THE NEURAL ENGINE

It's hard to imagine that you could portray Apple as a company that's been asleep at the Al switch when it built its first machine learning-focused custom silicon, the Neural Engine, into the A11 chip that shipped in iPhones five years ago and has continued to upgrade it almost every year.

If you hadn't noticed, Apple is pretty serious when it comes to its chip designs. And for the last five years-and who knows how many years of development before that-Apple has believed so much in empowering its devices to run machine learning algorithms that it's designed and included special processor cores dedicated specifically to the task. Apple clearly understood the power of this technology back before most of us had even heard of it.