the big day for Apple

Of all the Tech giants, it is the one considered the furthest behind – at least, apparently – in artificial intelligence, far behind Microsoft, Google, Amazon and even Meta. But for Apple, the situation could change this Monday evening, June 10, with the opening of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC24).

Generative artificial intelligence at Apple will arrive “later in the year”. We “let’s continue to dedicate considerable time and effort to this”. This is how, four months ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tried to reassure, but also to delay with a single message: no, Apple is not missing out on this major revolution that is AI.

We don’t know the details of the upcoming announcements, but the feeling of delay and even urgency felt as far away as California makes AI, in this month of June, the absolute priority. Especially since this generative and conversational AI should be everywhere, and benefit the iPhone as well as the Mac, the iPad and the Apple Watch, without forgetting the mixed reality mask, the Vision Pro. In short, to the entire ecosystem.

Is this impression of delay justified? Yes and no. No, because Apple has been doing AI very discreetly – probably too much – since… 2017… Since the processor of the iPhone 8 and X, the first to embed a neural engine, a “neural engine” in English, according to the terminology from Apple. This is also a detail that is unmistakable: for two years, Intel and other chip manufacturers who are going all out on AI, have been talking about “NPU” to designate the “Neural Processing Unit” in French. .

Since last month, Apple – and this is extremely rare – has aligned itself with the terminology of the rest of the industry, and now also speaks of “NPU” rather than “neural engine” to show that the company does not is not afraid of comparisons even if, apparently, Google and especially Microsoft have taken a lead. And so, yes, this delay is not just an impression since Apple would make its announcements last.

What is certain is that 5,000 developers drawn at random (there are more than 36 million in total), like every year, are converging from all over the world to attend, this Monday, June 10, these major announcements at Apple Park, the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. And in recent weeks, they have all followed the OpenAI, Microsoft and Google conferences.

So will Apple manage to innovate and surprise? We are awaiting confirmation of an agreement with OpenAI around chatGPT. And we are also talking about negotiations until the last moment with Google around Gemini. Will Apple succeed in bringing together the best of both AI worlds with potentially an all-new Siri, that previously not-so-intelligent voice assistant? Response Monday June 10, from 7 p.m. French time.