At the Q2, 2023 earnings call, Apple CEO Tim Cook said that the potential in the generative AI technology was “very interesting”.
In only a few months, ChatGPT has gained immense popularity. The new human-like interaction of the generative AI offers a whole-different communication experience with a chatbot to get answers, follow-up responses, and get tasks done like composing poems, writing articles, describing pictures, and more.
Apple CEO believes generative AI has “a number of issues” which need to be fixed
Apple voice assistant Siri has been around for over a decade, but its capabilities are drastically limited compared to the new ChatGPT AI. Recently, in a tell-all interview with The Information, former Apple AI and Siri engineers revealed that the growth of both technologies’ growth was adversely impacted by organizational dysfunction, lack of leadership, and privacy concerns.
Previously, a report on Apple’s strict privacy policy also mentioned that it limited the capabilities of Siri and other Services. However, the company’s CEO does not agree with the critics.
When asked about his opinion on the new generative AI like ChatGPT, Cook answered that the tech has a lot of potential but it needs to address its shortcomings.
Defending the company’s integration of AI and machine learning into Apple’s ecosystem, he said that technologies like Crash Detection, Fall Detection, and ECG were saving lives in the real world. Thus, he saw AI as “huge” but there are issues that need to be sorted.
Question: Shannon Cross of Credit Suisse
Tim, can you talk a bit about AI? It’s obviously more than the topic of the day. It seems like the topic of the year. Just how you think about it through your products and services. I know you use it in different ways, but also if you can just give us any thoughts you have on generative AI and I don’t know where you see it going, not sure what you want to say on it, but I’m really curious for your take. Thank you.
Answer: Tim Cook
But the potential is certainly very interesting. And we’ve obviously made enormous progress integrating AI and machine learning throughout our ecosystem and we weaved it into products and features for many years as you probably know. You can see that in things like fall detection and crash detection and ECG, these things are not only great features, they’re saving people’s lives out there. And so it’s absolutely remarkable. And so we are, we view AI as huge and we’ll continue weaving it in our products on a very thoughtful basis.
In March 2023, the tech company rejected an update of the BlueMail email app after the addition of new AI features powered by ChatGPT. As the generative AI produced inappropriate responses, Apple asked the developer to increase the app’s age restriction from 4 to 17 or add content filters. Such limitations of the ChatGPT AI have the tech giant on the fence for now.
