Apple Inc is pumping more artificial intelligence (AI) into the latest iPhones during the holiday shopping season with a free software update that includes a feature that enables users to create customized emojis within a matter of seconds.
The release of the iPhone’s upgraded operating system, iOS 18.2, on Wednesday extends Apple’s expansion into AI months after rivals such as Samsung Electronics Co and Google began implanting the revolutionary technology on their devices. The update builds upon another one that came out in late October to usher in the AI era for Apple and the iPhone, as well as for the iPad and Mac.
The latest round of AI tricks includes “Genmojis,” Apple’s description for emojis that iPhone users will be able to ask the technology to create and then share.
Photo : AFP
Apple says it is placing some limits on its AI’s emoji artistry to prevent the distribution of violent or hateful imagery.
Other features include an “Image Playground” for a variety of AI-styled illustrations, writing tools and options for summarizing e-mails.
The technology will not work on iPhones that Apple made before last year, because it requires a special processor that is not in older models. The AI will work on the iPhone 16 line-up that came out in September and the premium iPhone 15 models released last year.
That exclusivity is expected to propel a cycle of iPhone upgrades during the current holiday shopping season into next year, driving up Apple’s profit even higher from the US$94 billion that the Cupertino, California, company pocketed in its last fiscal year ending in September.
That expectation is the main reason Apple’s stock price has climbed by about 30 percent so far this year to push the company’s market value closer to the US$4 trillion threshold for the first time.
Separately, Google on Wednesday announced the launch of Gemini 2.0, its most advanced AI model to date, as the world’s tech giants race to take the lead in the fast-developing technology.
CEO Sundar Pichai said the new model would mark what the company calls “a new agentic era” in AI development, with AI models designed to understand and make decisions about the world around you.
“Gemini 2.0 is about making information much more useful,” Pichai said in the announcement, emphasizing the model’s enhanced ability to understand context, think multiple steps ahead and take supervised actions on behalf of users.
The developments “bring us closer to our vision of a universal assistant,” he added.
The release sent shares in Google soaring by more than 4 percent on Wall Street a day after the stock already gained 3.5 percent after the release of a breakthrough quantum chip.
An AI “agent,” the latest Silicon Valley trend, is a digital helper that is supposed to sense surroundings, make decisions and take actions to achieve specific goals.
The tech giants promise that agents would be the next stage of an AI revolution that was sparked by the 2022 launch of ChatGPT, which took the world by storm.
Additional reporting by AFP
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