According to insider information from Apple provided by Mark Gurman, a year after the launch of Apple Intelligence, the upcoming Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which will take place on June 9, is expected to reveal the tech giant's strategic dilemmas in the field of artificial intelligence.
"Cut-down Version" Models to Be Opened Up, Core Technologies Kept Under Wraps
The WWDC’s highlight for AI will be the opening up of Apple’s self-developed foundational models to third-party developers. However, these models, which can run on Apple devices, only have around 3 billion parameters and are relatively small in scale compared to current industry standards, with limited performance mainly supporting basic functions like text summarization.
What’s more surprising is that Apple actually has a more powerful lineup of internal AI models. According to Gurman’s report, Apple is running multiple models with 3 billion, 7 billion, 33 billion, and 150 billion parameters internally. The largest cloud-based model has reached performance levels comparable to the current version of ChatGPT in internal benchmark tests, capable of handling complex tasks, significantly surpassing device-end models.
However, this 150-billion-parameter model is currently limited to internal testing and is mainly used within Apple's "Playground" system for employees to compare and evaluate tools such as Gemini and ChatGPT, with no public release plans at present.
Severe Leadership Disagreements, Major Projects Significantly Delayed
Gurman points out that Apple leadership still has severe disagreements over its AI strategy, and concerns about AI hallucinations have prevented the company from launching its own chatbot. This also explains why Apple Intelligence chose to include ChatGPT as an integrated option.
Progress on multiple major AI projects has been severely delayed. The originally planned next-generation conversational Siri, aimed at competing with ChatGPT's advanced voice capabilities, has had its release time indefinitely postponed. The comprehensive upgrade of the Quick Actions app's Apple Intelligence is also expected to be released until 2026.
In addition, the AI health service project codenamed "Mulberry" has encountered technical obstacles, and the internal web chatbot "Knowledge," designed to mimic the Perplexity service, remains a long way from being launched.
WWDC Becomes a "Marketing Packaging Show"
Besides opening up foundational models, Apple is expected to release mostly minor updates to AI features at WWDC: an AI power-saving mode, a translation application supporting Siri and AirPods, and repackaging existing tools in Safari and Photos applications as "AI-driven" features. Gurman直言 that these changes are more for marketing purposes than genuine technological innovation.
Apple first introduced Apple Intelligence in June 2024, positioning it as "AI for everyone." However, the initial features, including Genmoji, automatic text input, and contextual notifications, received lukewarm responses from both developers and users, highlighting Apple's disadvantage in the generative AI domain.
Facing intense AI competition, Apple's conservative strategy and internal divisions are becoming the biggest obstacles to its technological development.