Apple seems happy to stay out of the spotlight when it comes to the “AI race” going by its latest summit.

Microsoft, Google, Baidu, and others have all raced to make very public AI announcements over the past month. Apple held its own AI event earlier this month but it was a staff-only affair.

Apple’s low-key AI event was notable as being the first to be held in-person at the Steve Jobs Theatre since the pandemic began. Other than that, it wasn’t particularly newsworthy—which is somewhat newsworthy in itself.

Most AI solutions rely on the cloud for processing. Google is moving an increasing amount to on-device but Apple, for better or worse, has made a big deal about its on-device AI strategy.

One of the ways that Apple markets itself as differing from rivals is its privacy-first approach. The firm collects minimal data and processes it on-device. That approach has worked great for Apple but the company may begin to struggle as it requires more data and processing power—something we may already be seeing.

Siri is widely perceived to be the third most capable virtual assistant behind Google and Alexa. Apple currently has no answer to the ChatGPT and Bard chatbots unveiled by Microsoft and Google respectively.

One of the primary uses for machine learning over the years has been web search. The threat that a ChatGPT-integrated Bing poses to Google reportedly set off the alarm bells over at Mountain View and led to the frantic (and “botched”) announcement of Bard.

Apple has reportedly been working on its own search engine but the company’s ethos against data collection could be holding it back from launching a product that can go toe-to-toe against Google and Bing.

At its AI event this month, Apple appeared set on rallying employees and convincing them it isn’t falling behind. Apple’s AI chief told attendees that “machine learning is moving faster than ever” and that Apple has talent that is “truly at the forefront.”

That doesn’t sound like a company that is particularly confident.

“While that may be Apple’s belief, I haven’t heard of anything — for consumers — that is a game changer coming out of the summit,” wrote Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in the latest edition of his Power On newsletter.

“For those wondering, I don’t believe Apple previewed a ChatGPT/New Bing competitor or anything of the sort.”

Apple isn’t known to rush products to market and it’s not surprising that we’re not getting any major announcements ahead of WWDC. However, this staff-only event – and Gurman’s report – certainly gives the impression that Apple knows it’s not as well-positioned as its rivals when it comes to AI.

For now, Apple looks quite happy to sit out of the spotlight when it comes to AI. This year, all the attention will be firmly on its mixed-reality headset. However, questions will certainly be raised in the coming years about whether Apple is an AI leader unless it can silence the critics.

AR overtakes AI as the ‘most disruptive’ emerging technology

A new report from GlobalData finds that professionals now believe AR will disrupt their industry more than AI.

70 percent of the 2,341 respondents across 30 business sectors picked AR as disrupting their industry most out of a selection of seven emerging technologies: AI, cybersecurity, cloud computing, IoT, blockchain, and 5G.

Filipe Oliveira, Senior Analyst at GlobalData, commented: “This change in how people see AR will likely be long term, and not just a temporary blip. It is clear that people are warming towards the technology, even if they don’t believe that it will make a big difference tomorrow.” 

AI wins some ground back when it comes to confidence in the technology. 57 percent of the respondents believe that AI will live up to all of its promises compared to just 26 percent for AR.

Along those same lines, 31 percent believe “The technology is hyped, but I can see a use for it” for AI, while a huge 50 percent report the same for AR.

Apple’s decision to add a LiDAR sensor to its latest mobile devices was seen as an important step towards the mass adoption of AR. Excitement is also growing around so-called “metaverses” that converge virtually-enhanced physical reality with physically-persistent shared virtual spaces.

SenseTime, one of China’s leading AI companies, announced earlier this week that it had partnered with BilibiliWorld to create a metaverse. The experience leverages SenseTime’s AI and mixed reality technologies to enable players to enjoy role-playing games that seamlessly blend reality with virtuality.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said the company “will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company”. As the owner of Oculus, Zuckerberg’s plans for the future of Facebook will likely make people think of a large virtual space similar to that depicted in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One novel and the 2018 film adaptation.

Some people have expressed concern about a large centralised company such as Facebook having control over such a potentially ubiquitous world and the content they consume. Many believe that an open-source decentralised version is vital:

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