Ryan Christoffel writing for: Apple’s Hitting Its AI Stride Right as Competition Is Slowing

It happens all the time. Tech giants ship exciting new technology while Apple’s projects stay veiled in R&D, leading to the constant narrative that the company is ‘behind’ in that area.

With AI, that story may have actually had some truth to it—but things are starting to change.

Apple shipped major AI features to potentially hundreds of millions of devices with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1 last month.

And:

Before the end of the year, I have no doubt Apple’s AI features—especially what’s coming in 18.2—will become more mainstream than any other existing AI product.

We will see what happens, but I have to be honest and say this feels like a very Apple-centric view of things. ChatGPT is famously the fastest growing product of all time, reaching 100 million users, despite having zero system integration on any platform (that would come later), in like a month and a half. Today, ChatGPT is more than doubling its usage from the same time last year and their website is likely one of the 10 most visited sites in the world. And that’s just their web traffic, many millions more use ChatGPT from their top-ranked iOS and Android app as well as inside one of the thousands of integrations other software has built ChatGPT into.

I’m not saying Apple’s features will have a dozen users or anything, but I would challenge anyone who thinks Apple’s LLM features will be more “mainstream” then ChatGPT “before the end of the year” to validate that next month. If more people know about and have used Image Playground than ChatGPT by then, I’ll eat an AirPod.