There’s probably generative AppleAI in the making currently but it needs to enhance the user experience in a similar fashion to the computational photography in iPhones which uses neural processing unit hardware.
Although there’s a huge generative AI gold rush happening currently, it’s early days. Large language models, as the tech is also referred to, seems to be an impressive solution looking for a killer application, with many intellectual property and regulatory minefields along the way.
Macs are aimed at the creative crowd, which might feel uneasy using generative AI. It all depends on how it’s done of course, like you could have video editors generating scene backgrounds and maybe even creating characters (ideally with the correct number of fingers, which image-making AIs have a problem doing) that “star” with real actors in movies. Admittedly, it could be a terrible idea as well and readers can fill in the gaps here as to why.
One area where LLMs could make a huge impact for a general audience is games. Graphics chip maker Nvidia has pivoted into silicon that accelerates AI; as announced earlier this year the company is already working on making non-playable characters becoming more realistic through generative AI, and learning from their interactions with gamers.
Adding an AI dimension could boost Apple’s gaming creds which despite some decent efforts continue to lag behind Microsoft Windows, with offerings mainly for iPhones and iPads, and not a great deal for macOS desktops and laptops.
Gaming is a huge business, as evidenced by Microsoft trying to push through a massive $100 billion deal to buy Call of Duty maker Activision Blizzard - and failing in its mission, with UK and US regulatory watchdogs saying no.
There are strong indications that Apple is eyeing up the gaming market more thoroughly. At WWDC, Apple talked about a way to run Windows games on Macs.
Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is based on Codeweaver’s Crossover code which is essentially Wine. If you’re a free and open source software user, you’ll have heard of Wine. There are many really great Microsoft Windows apps and Wine gives you access to them on Linux and UNIX-like operating systems like FreeBSD and Apple’s macOS. Codeweavers is essentially the company that pays for the open source Wine project which has been going for almost 30 years now.
We’re straying into Deep Gaming Geek Land here, but there’s support coming for Microsoft’s DirectX 12 application programming interfaces which is the most current release for Windows. Long story short, developers will be able to make their DirectX 12-based games run on macOS at some point which if you’re into these things is an impressive coding effort.
It’s still quite a way off and the translation provided by Wine/Crossover is not ready, but imagine getting full access to Windows games on Macs, with a dollop of AI to go with it.
That should be a huge priority for Apple, especially now that the transition to its very powerful in-house developed Arm processor architecture is done.
Either way, one hold up will be Apple’s focus on privacy. Apple’s general idea here is that processing of sensitive data happens on users’ devices, and isn’t sent to the cloud. At WWDC 2023, Apple announced a slew of new features that tighten up privacy (and security) for its operating systems, in order to put sand in the vaseline of abusive trackers and other digital scoundrels.
How that will play out with generative AI remains to be seen. There are already concerns that using eg. ChatGPT could leak information as users prompt the AI, which then learns from that and could end up sharing sensitive material to the world.
Obviously, the more material an AI is fed the better it gets and sharing data is desirable. This will require some serious braininess to solve, sharing information while deeply caring about user privacy. Either way, I for one welcome our privacy-oriented AI overlords.
