Can Apple catch up with rivals in the AI race?

IN JUNE 2023, Apple chief executive Tim Cook walked onstage at the company’s flagship annual developers conference to announce, in the tradition set by Steve Jobs, “one more thing”.

Just six months earlier, OpenAI’s ChatGPT had launched, gaining a million users in just five days and triggering a new cycle in the tech industry. Generative artificial intelligence (gen AI), the technology promising a profound new level of machine intelligence, was not new. But the chatbot was the first product based on large language models to truly grab the popular imagination.

The proponents of gen AI say it portends a radical future where our devices can contextually understand vast amounts of information and offer dynamic, smarter, humanlike responses to our needs.