Earlier this month, Apple held its employee-only AI-focused event at the Steve Jobs Theater, a venue where the company has showcased its releases since 2017.
The event is held annually and is also known as the “AI WWDC”, attended exclusively by Apple employees. For the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began, the summit could be held in person, although it was also streamed live for those employees who were unable to attend.
As expected, this year has garnered more than its fair share of attention due to the “boom” in artificial intelligence. Google and Microsoft are in the process of integrating this technology into their products, with the occasional hiccup along the way. In this regard, Apple was lagging noticeably behind in the eyes of the public. However, the reality could not be more different.
In the latest edition of Power On, a newsletter written by Mark Gurman (Bloomberg), a brief summary of this summit was shared. According to Gurman, Apple’s head of artificial intelligence told employees that “machine learning is evolving faster than ever” and that the talent working for Apple is “really on the cutting edge”.
Gurman, however, seemed unaware of any “game-changing” announcements. Unlike Google, Apple did not introduce any products that would directly compete with ChatGPT or the “new Bing”.
This is not a big surprise either. If Apple has any powerful announcements on AI and machine learning, it will save them for the next WWDC to be held next June. After all, the Developers Conference represents one of Apple’s most important technology showcases of the year.
Will we finally see Apple’s mixed reality headset?
The truth is that WWDC has a large audience of developers, which makes it the ideal place for Apple to claim its place in the mixed reality market. In addition to perfecting its aforementioned headset, the bitten apple company faces another major challenge: convincing a consumer who is confused and tired of the competition’s proposals.
The most notable of all is Meta, which has pushed its metaverse idea to exhaustion and despite the effort invested, it has not quite taken off. If we look at Steam’s statistics, 2.19% of users currently own a virtual reality headset, a number that despite growing, is still tiny in terms of market adoption. Will Apple’s much anticipated headset change the situation?
