Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene last year, companies have been scrambling to add AI to their products.

Apple has been a bit slow to get out of this trap, but behind the scenes, the wheels are in motion to allow the iPhone 16 to harness the full power of artificial intelligence.

In fact, Apple reportedly has an "imperative" to ensure that iOS 18 is loaded with "features that run on the company's massive language model," and just this week Tim Cook told shareholders that the company will be "breaking new ground in generative AI" later this year

It is not a new frontier.

What will that actually look like? Here is what we have heard so far.

The most obvious improvement for Apple's artificial intelligence is an upgrade to Siri. We have always felt that this virtual assistant is a step behind Google Assistant and Alexa in terms of smarts, but Siri 2.0, with its massive language model, could be a huge leap forward.

In January, the iOS 17.4 beta revealed a reference to a private framework called "SiriSummarization" that makes calls to the ChatGPT API; the link to ChatGPT seems to be for sense-checking purposes (i.e., Apple is a competitor testing its own model against other companies), but the functionality seems similar. According to the code, it appears that phrases such as "Please summarize," "Please answer this question," and "Please summarize the given text" can be used.

The same code dive also found input related to iMessage, suggesting integration with the Messages app; Bloomberg's Mark Gurman previously suggested that Apple's AI would work with Messages to "field questions and autocomplete sentences," So this is not a big surprise. It may also be incorporated into AppleCare for iPhone support.

Another interesting AI benefit for the average iPhone user may be indirect: according to Gurman, Apple is about to release a generative AI tool for developers to facilitate the development of apps for the iPhone Gurman says Apple is about to release a generative AI tool for developers to facilitate iPhone app development. The report also mentions other features closer to home: for example, playlists in Apple Music could be created automatically by AI, and there is talk that slides in Keynote software could be automated as well.

One area where Google and Samsung excel in smartphones is AI image editing with Magic Editor and Generative Edit, respectively. On that note, Apple recently partnered with researchers at UC Santa Barbara to develop an AI model that can edit images based on user instructions. Hopefully this is part of what will be included in future iPhones.

Of course, some of these possible AI features may not be exclusive to the iPhone 16 if they are offered as part of iOS 18, given Apple's historical commitment to backward compatibility in software updates.

However, the iPhone 16 will still have an advantage thanks to the upcoming A18 processor, which will reportedly feature an upgraded Neural Engine to improve machine learning and AI tasks. In other words, the iPhone 16 may perform exclusive AI tasks on the device, while older handsets may instead rely on an Internet connection to Apple's cloud servers.

Whether this will be enough to prompt an upgrade to the iPhone 16 in September is, of course, another question; we expect more will be said about Apple's AI plans at WWDC 2024, so everything should become clearer then. since 2007, WWDC has always been held in June.