Alongside today’s Q4 earnings conference call, Apple CEO Tim Cook also spoke with CNBC, where he addressed Apple’s predicament in the AI field. Here’s what he said.
Expansion plans on the roadmap
When Apple announced its partnership with OpenAI as part of the Apple Intelligence toolset, it wasn’t long before Craig Federighi, the company’s Senior Vice President of Software, confirmed that their plans included “doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future.”
His remarks came at the height of Google’s antitrust woes, and the expectation was that Google and Apple were possibly waiting on the outcome of the case to move forward with an announcement.
Cut to the present, and despite Google’s overall positive outcome, Apple has yet to confirm a partnership, either with Google or any other AI provider.
Behind the scenes, Apple has been laying the groundwork for MCP support on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS. MCP, or Model Context Protocol, is an open standard created by Anthropic that allows interoperability between AI models, and user-facing tools and applications.
Additionally, the company has been working on expanding support for third-party models on Image Playground beyond ChatGPT.
However, Apple has yet to announce any concrete plans to expand its partnerships beyond the ChatGPT integration with Siri and its Writing Tools feature. When asked about it by CNBC, Cook didn’t share any specifics, but claimed that Apple’s “intention is to integrate with more people over time”.
9to5Mac’s take
Cook’s remarks follow a series of forward-looking statements made by Apple to make up for its AI fumbles.
While it is true that company has been delivering on useful machine learning-based features, such as car crash detection, AirPods live translation, high blood pressure alerts onthe Apple Watch, expectations have been mounting for the company to deliver on what the general public has grown more accustomed to calling AI, which are interactive, LLM-based products, some of which can act on the user’s behalf.
In addition to missing and extending deadlines for new AI products and features, Apple has also been facing a relentless talent exodus, with multiple AI leaders and research engineers defecting to companies such as Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others.
Although welcome, Cook’s limited claim that Apple’s “intention is to integrate with more people over time” does little to reassure concerns about the company’s short-term AI roadmap.
In fact, it serves as a reminder that Apple has yet to announce any tangible progress or near-term plans, exactly three months after calling a company-wide meeting to reassure its employees that AI “sort of ours to grab,” and that Apple would “make the investment to do it.”
Do you think Apple is anywhere close to announcing a new AI partnership? Let us know in the comments.
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