Apple's olive branch: For its AI efforts to succeed, it needs aid

Can it count on external developers to help make headway on AI?

- DAVE LEE

If you read Bloomberg Businessweek's deep dive into Apple's blundering work with artificial intelligence, a consistent theme is its lack of clarity over what AI on an Apple device should actually do. On Tuesday, with the company looking no closer to an answer internally, we learnt it would soon open things up so others could have a go at figuring it out.

"The iPhone maker is working on a software development kit and related frameworks that will let outsiders build AI features based on the large language models that the company uses for Apple Intelligence," Bloomberg News' Mark Gurman reported, citing people with knowledge of the company's planned announcements at its coming and critically important Worldwide Developers Conference on 9 June.

I say 'critically important' because it's Apple's best chance to reset the negative energy around its AI work to date. At last year's event, executives announced a great sweep of features that, 12 months on, still aren't available on devices—despite glitzy (and carefully worded) advertising campaigns suggesting they would be. What has been launched, such as error-prone news summaries, has been disappointing. Apple's personal assistant Siri continues to embarrass the brand. Apple's decision to team up with OpenAI to help it deal with more complex AI tasks was an acknowledgment of its position as a laggard. This week's news might be seen as another.