Apple’s iPad event was an AI appetizer

Apple’s recently hatched plan to catch up to rivals in artificial intelligence, specifically in generative AI (GenAI), have begun to be revealed, starting with the company’s May 2nd conference call with analysts following its Q224 earnings release and with this week’s
“Let Loose” iPad event showcasing the company’s new M4 SoC, with a new Neural Engine for artificial intelligence and machine learning.

M4 has an extremely fast Neural Engine — an IP block in the chip dedicated to the acceleration of AI workloads. This is Apple’s most powerful Neural Engine ever, capable of an astounding 38 trillion operations per second — an astouding 60x faster than the first Neural Engine in Apple’s A11 Bionic (launched September 12, 2017). Together with next-generation ML accelerators in the CPU, the high-performance GPU, and higher-bandwidth unified memory, the Neural Engine makes M4 an extremely powerful chip for AI.

Daniel Howley for Yahoo Finance:
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The M4 unveiling… [serves] as an appetizer for the AI features the company will present at its WWDC event in June, when Apple is widely expected to debut a slew of generative AI-powered software features for its various devices.

Apple pointed to a number of the M4’s AI bona fides during the keynote, with vice president of platform architecture Tim Millet specifically noting that the chip is capable of 34 [sic 38] trillion operations per second, a measurement commonly used when describing a chip’s AI performance.

Millet also said that the M4’s neural engine is more powerful than any neural processing unit in any AI PC. That’s a direct shot at Intel (INTC), AMD (AMD), and Qualcomm (QCOM), which are preparing to or are already rolling out their own AI PC chips designed to run large language models on Windows laptops and desktops.

The company also didn’t provide information about the M4’s performance while training or running large language models (LLMs), something that Intel, Qualcomm, and AMD regularly point to as indicators of their chips’ strengths.

Still, the fact that Apple gave consumers, and Wall Street, an early look at its AI thinking is important.

The company is widely viewed as behind the curve when it comes to the generative AI race, and investors are banking heavily on WWDC serving as Apple’s big AI coming-out party.

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MacDailyNews Take: Yes, Apple missed it, but they have the resources necessary to catch up quickly (and, hopefully, someday lead the way) in AI.

Clearly, Apple is not as innovative as it was under Steve Jobs who even started the company’s work on Apple Silicon, Apple Watch, and Apple Vision Pro, but, thanks to Jobs and Cook’s subsequent management of iterations of products and services conceived during Jobs’ tenure, including the retail store buildout which is responsible for a significant portion of Apple’s growth, the company now has more than enough money to make up for Cook’s lack of vision. – MacDailyNews, April 23, 2024

Tim’s not a product person, per se. – Steve Jobs

Until it gets another visionary leader (fingers crossed; Apple’s history has shown – cough, Sculley, Spindler, cough – that the next CEO could be far, far worse than the very competent caretaker Cook), Apple can afford to miss things like generative AI – which they clearly did – and then use its huge war chest to catch up – which they’re doing right now (fun times and 80-hour weeks inside Apple Park!) – and, hopefully, surpass rivals (or at least be as good). Apple will very likely unveil their catch-up work within months (this June at WWDC 2024) in iPhones (and iPads, Apple Watches, etc.) with built-in on-device generative AI and other new AI-driven features. – MacDailyNews, February 14, 2024
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