Apple has quietly bought one other AI company with its recent acquisition of DarwinAI, a Canadian startup focused on computer vision and making AI systems faster and more efficient.
Apple has been slow to get off the bottom in comparison with other big tech AI players and has been very tight-lipped about potential AI integrations for its products.
During Apple's first-quarter earnings call in February, CEO Tim Cook said the corporate was taking a slower, more deliberate approach to AI. However, it looks like we'll be seeing some AI news from Cook soon, as Cook said Apple shall be “breaking recent ground” with GenAI this 12 months.
DarwinAI may or will not be a part of Apple's plans to integrate AI into the upcoming iOS 18. We'll must see if the acquisition was about mental property or the power so as to add staff to the AI development team.
DarwinAI's technology has largely been implemented in computer vision for inspecting components within the manufacturing process. So it could even end up that Apple wants to make use of DarwinAI's mental property in its supply chain to optimize the manufacturing of its electronic hardware.
Bloomberg Apple initially reported the acquisition, but Apple has not yet confirmed the acquisition of the corporate. Nevertheless, the domain darwinai.com now not works and co-founder Alexander Wong's LinkedIn profile now states that he’s the Director of Machine Learning Research at Apple.
Apple is reportedly planning to spend $1 billion annually to fund the event of its Gen AI products. There have already been reports of the corporate internally using its chatbot called Apple GPT and an LLM called Ajax. Will we see these in iOS 18 or as an updated Siri version?
Apple doesn't move at the identical speed as Microsoft or Google, but when it releases a product, it all the time moves the innovation needle in dramatic ways.
Expect more acquisitions and a few big Apple AI news in the following few months.
