Apple’s generative AI is expected to be announced as part of iOS 18 during the company’s upcoming WWDC in June. However, the features may not become available for iPhones already on the market.
Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has said Apple’s “first wave” of AI will be hardware based, meaning there is a chance the features will require specialist hardware not currently available on existing iPhones.
This means it’s possible an iPhone 16 will be the only way to access the initial rollout of Apple’s AI features.
Back in February there was a report that suggested the A18 chip was going to power the iPhone 16, with an upgraded Neural Engine that “significantly increased the number of built-in AI computing cores.”
Gurman states there will be major benefits to keeping the processes on the device, including speed of processing and privacy, as requests wouldn’t leave the device.
“As the world awaits Apple’s big AI unveiling on June 10, it looks like the initial wave of features will work entirely on device. That means there’s no cloud processing component to the company’s large language model, the software that powers the new capabilities. This approach comes with some benefits, including speed and privacy.”
