In the wake of the ChatGPT craze and Google and Microsoft’s response to artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbots, Apple is reportedly about to host an AI summit for all employees.
According to BGR, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman tweeted on Twitter that Apple will hold a live event next week at the Steve Jobs Theater at the company’s headquarters. The keynote will also be streamed, and the media will not be invited to this Apple AI summit.
This will be Apple’s first live event since the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic. More importantly, this conference was planned by Apple even before the pandemic hit. This is in contrast to Google and Microsoft, which rushed to hold public events in early February in response to the “wave” of ChatGPT.
Gurman said this AI summit will become an annual internal event at Apple. It’s like a WWDC (developer conference) for AI, but only for Apple employees. According to Gurman, the event will be similar to Apple’s press conferences from before the pandemic, which marks a return to the traditional events for future Apple product launches.
In addition to the upcoming AI event, Apple is also expected to hold an event for its mixed reality glasses in the spring, before WWDC 2023 opens in the early summer. The dates of these events are still a secret, and Apple has not confirmed a separate launch event for the mixed-reality glasses.
The fact that Apple is soon hosting a conference dedicated to AI is not surprising given that smarter Siri could be the secret weapon of mixed reality glasses from Apple. The company is said to want users to rely on Siri to code mixed reality apps via voice. This means that major Siri innovations will need to be announced before that, as the voice assistant’s ability to process human voices and perform complex tasks will require a lot of AI. Besides, the emergence of ChatGPT also shows the importance of conversational AI in the future, especially for wearable devices like mixed-reality glasses.
Even so, it remains unclear whether the upcoming conference will involve mixed reality glasses. However, it is certain that Apple will have to respond soon to ChatGPT, especially if they also have a need for AI. Like Google and Microsoft, Apple may have many AI products in development that it doesn’t want to discuss publicly. Before Apple, Google announced Bard, while Microsoft announced the integration of the AI engine “better” than ChatGPT into Bing.