Last year, Apple unveiled a new series of iPhones, as is customary at this time of year. The only thing that was promised to make these new gadgets appealing to us was AI, or Apple Intelligence, as they called it. However, customer technology’s global community has cooled down.
Over a hundred billion dollars were soon wiped off of Apple’s share price because the lack of enthusiasm from the public was so obvious. Fans of all new things technology, yet the Wired Gadget Lab podcast, did not find anything in the new features that would compel them to switch to the iPhone 16
The addition of a fresh lens lock button on the side of the mobile did not seem to cause much excitement, but rather the inclusion of a new camera shutter button. Something is obviously wrong if a box is a better selling level than the most gimmick-filled technology of the past few years.
The Media Copilot described Artificial as having passed what its “wondering period” as. We were pleasantly surprised two years ago when conceptual AI systems like ChatGPT, DALL-E, and others were able to produce clear writing and practical images from a few words in a text quick.
But then, AI needs to show that it can really be successful. Since their launch, the concepts driving these activities have become much more powerful – and rapidly more expensive.
However, Google, NVidia, Microsoft and OpenAI just met at the White House to explore AI system, suggesting these companies are doubling down on the systems.
According to Forbes, the industry is US$ 500 billion short of recovering the significant investments in AI hardware and software, and the$ 100 billion in AI revenue projected for 2024 is not even close to this figure.
Apple must also support the inclusion of AI features in its products for the same purpose that Google, Samsung, and Microsoft are doing it to give customers a reason to purchase a new system.
Strong market?
Before AI, the industry was attempting to spread awareness about the Metaverse and virtual reality, which probably peaked with the release of the Apple Vision Pro helmet in 2023 ( a product that, ironically, was hardly mentioned in previous week’s news ).
Tech firms needed something else to generate income after the Metaverse failed, and AI has come to be the new bright object. However, it’s still to be seen if users will adopt AI-based features like reading and photo-editing capabilities.
This does not mean that the current AI is ineffective. AI systems are used in billion-dollar market applications, in everything from online advertising to care and energy optimization.
Generative AI has also grown to be a useful tool for practitioners in a variety of areas. A study found that 97 % of software developers have employed AI tools to support their work. Some editors, visual artists, musicians and artists have adopted Iot tools to create content more swiftly and more effectively.
Despite attempts at AI-supported search proving to be prone to mistakes, the majority of us are not really willing to pay for a company that draws hilarious cartoon cats or summarizes text. Apple’s strategy for deploying unnatural intelligence seems to be largely a jumble of existing functions, many of which are now integrated into well-known third-party apps.
Apple’s AI can help you build a custom icon, record a telephone call, edit a photo, or read an email – beautiful, but no more groundbreaking stuff. There is also a feature called Reduce mode that is supposed to make you feel less unimportant and only through important notifications, but it’s anyone’s guess how well that will actually work.
The one forward-looking feature is called Visual Intelligence. Without performing a search on your part, you can use the camera to point it at something in the air and get information. For instance, you might take a picture of a restaurant sign and receive a phone message with the menu, reviews, and possibly even assistance with table reservations.
Although this is very reminiscent of the Lens in Google’s Pixel phones ( or ChatGPT’s multimodal capabilities ) it does point towards a future use of AI that is more real-time, interactive, and situated in real-world environments.
Apple Intelligence and the Reduce mode could change into what has been envisioned and demonstrated in research projects since the 1990s, but the majority of the time it has n’t developed into a real product category. This has been done since the 1990s.
The ironic part of all this is that Apple Intelligence is not yet really accessible for anyone to try, as the new iPhones do not yet include them. They might turn out to be more valuable than the lack of details seems to suggest.
However, Apple used to be known for only releasing products when they were fully and truly ready, which meant that the use-case was unmistakably perfect and the user experience was flawless.
This is what made the iPod and iPhone so much more appealing than the previous generation of MP3 players and smartphones. It’s anyone’s guess if Apple’s AI strategy will be able to recover some of the lost stock price, not to mention the hundreds of billions that they and the rest of the tech industry have invested.
After all, AI still has a lot of potential, but it might be time to step back and consider where it will actually be most useful.
Lars Erik Holmquist is professor of design and innovation, Nottingham Trent University
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