Apple has acquired Canadian artificial intelligence startup DarwinAI, a company that specializes in building vision-based technology for inspecting components during manufacturing to improve efficiency.
According to a Bloomberg report, neither Apple nor DarwinAI have announced the deal, but several of the startup’s employees joined the Silicon Valley giant’s machine learning team back in January, as per their LinkedIn profiles.
This also includes DarwinAI’s co-founder Alexander Wong, who has signed up as the director of machine learning research at Apple.
Apple did not respond to a request for comment on the acquisition, but the company did tell Bloomberg that it “buys smaller technology companies from time to time”.
Apple Acquisition of DarwinAI Points Fingers at Upcoming On-Device AI in iOS 18
Apart from aiding with ensuring manufacturing efficiency, DarwinAI also uses techniques to make AI models smaller and faster, which could be useful for Apple when it hopefully introduces on-device generative AI features in iOS 18 with the iPhone 16 this year.
Apple lags way behind its competitors like Google, Microsoft, Meta, and OpenAI when it comes to releasing generative AI-powered features for its devices.
During a quarterly earnings call in February, CEO Tim Cook said the company has plans to introduce such features “later this year”.
At the same meeting, Cook said Apple’s modus operandi has always been “to do work and then talk about work, and not to get out in front of ourselves”.
In 2023, Apple bought a total of 32 AI startups, with DarwinAI being the latest in a long list of similar acquisitions.
Late last year, reports surfaced about a large language model developed by the company called ‘Apple GPT’, which is being used internally. Apple has been tight-lipped about its AI plans.
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In February, Apple axed its ambitious electric car project and shifted almost 2,000 employees, including software engineers, to the AI development team led by John Giannandrea, the company’s senior vice president of machine learning and AI strategy.
Apple is expected to showcase some capabilities of the Apple GPT at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June.
Reports suggest that Apple is designing an Ajax framework for its large language models, which has been trained on 200 billion parameters and is said to be more capable than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5.
As per estimates, the company is on track to spend over $4 billion on AI servers and hardware in 2024.
During Apple’s AI Summit, held in February 2023, it briefed employees on work related to generative AI. There were a few discussions about how the company’s AI model could be incorporated into the Siri voice assistant.
What Can We Expect From Apple in the Future?
Apple’s current application of AI is limited to the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset and several other software features in iOS17, such as the AI-powered enhancement of pictures in the iPhone’s gallery, Crash, and Fall Detection feature on the Apple Watch that uses machine learning to determine if the wearer has been involved in an accident, or the ability to digitally clone your voice.
The company’s job listing also suggests that it is bringing AI into multiple internal and external areas of business, including Siri, developer tools, and customer support.
Apple is expected to introduce the iOS 18 and the new MacOS at the WWDC, where we will get to see the company’s work with AI first-hand.
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