It has been nearly three years since Apple held in-person events that brought together the brightest minds in the business. Since the pandemic, most events have been pre-recorded and very few have been invited inside the hallowed halls. Well, all that is set to change starting this month with the annual in-house AI Summit. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman shared the news about Apple AI on Twitter.
The AI Summit is only open to Apple employees, but it is the first time since Covid restrictions have eased that the tech giant is holding a full-fledged in-person event. The excitement is palpable and the tech community is hoping new developments and projects will be revealed.
It has been a difficult year for tech with non-performing stocks and mass layoffs across companies. The Apple AI Summit will just be the right balm to soothe troubled minds. It will be held at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park.
The Apple AI Summit
An annual affair, the Apple AI Summit is only open to employees. Gurman wrote that the event will be broadcast to employees who cannot attend the event in-person.
Interestingly, the event will be held in the Steve Jobs Theater at the Apple HQ and the in-person event will be streamed to employees as well. So, essentially how Apple held media events pre-Covid. Have to wonder if Apple will also return to that for public product launches. https://t.co/uhLv4se9oW
— Mark Gurman (@markgurman) February 6, 2023
The AI Summit announcement comes after Apple eased pandemic-era regulations and employees are no longer obligated to take the Covid-19 test to attend events. Apple has been extremely cautious with its events and as recently as the iPhone 14 launch in September 2022 was pre-recorded.
Apple fans are hopeful that the AI Summit’s revelations will be made available for the world during the Worldwide Developers Conference(WWDC) 2023 slated for June.
In recent years, Apple has released a host of AI-powered products that have helped the company gain solid market share. Its most popular offerings include virtual assistant Siri, Homekit and face ID recognition, Apple watch, and offline translation.
The most recent addition is Apple’s catalog of audiobooks narrated by AI. Launched without much fanfare, this could mean the end of a job stream for human narrators. A quick search for “AI narration” in the company’s Books app, reveals the list of titles.
This is possibly just the start of a new era. If accepted, it can have worldwide implications for authors, narrators, and publishers.
To quietly come up with such a life-changing product speaks to Apple’s capabilities in the AI sector. The AI Summit is expected to be revolutionary and Apple fans hope that the tech giant will share some news with its fans.
AI and Search
ChatGPT’s launch has brought AI into the limelight, sending other companies scurrying to up their game as the AI-based chatbot continues to trend. Currently, it attracts around 13 million unique visitors a day and people have been experimenting on all kinds of things with it. It was built by San Francisco based Open AI.
Open AI expects the service to bring in $200 million in revenue by the end of the year. The mind-blogging prospect of growth made Microsoft invest $10 billion in OpenAI.
Bard
The ChatGPT revolution even pushed search-engine lord Google to call urgent board meetings and evaluate its AI-based projects. Not one to hold back, Google announced on February 7 that it will soon release its own AI-powered service, Bard. The service will be privately tested before it is rolled out to the public.
In a memo, reviewed by CNBC, CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that Bard will remain a top priority for the firm and in the coming week every Googler will be expected to test the product internally.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA. Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it’s a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023
Ernie
Yet another one joining the race for AI-powered dominance is Ernie by Baidu. Ernie is short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration and has been in the works since 2019. Baidu is a Chinese company that specializes in Internet-related services and hopes to let Ernie run the show soon. Shares for the tech company rose by nearly 13% on the back of Ernie’s popularity.
Apple fans and industry experts are hopeful that the AI Summit will open the doors to the company’s entrance into the search wars. Apple had earlier hired AI experts to work on its artificial intelligence capabilities. It remains to be seen whether Apple will share its secrets with the world before the WWDC, where it is expected to reveal its latest software developments.
