Apple Could Make Some AI Features Run On The iPhone With iOS 18: Here’s What It Means

Apple is planning for the big AI era and the iOS 18 update is expected to be one of its biggest in history. The company is planning to rival OpenAI, Microsoft and Google but it could have a different patch for its AI applications. Latest report suggests the iOS 18 version could see some of the AI features running on the device.

What this means is that iPhone users will not have to worry about their data being used for training AI models or falling into the hands of third-party entities. Apple has given privacy a big focus over the years and it seems the AI strategy is not going to stray away from that either.

iOS 18 will be revealed on June 14 at the WWDC 2024 keynote by Tim Cook and Co. but the build-up to the big event suggests Apple is still fine tuning its strategy and plans based on how its engineering and AI team manages to cohesively bring a competent solution to the iPhone users.

It is good to see Apple trying to take its stand on user privacy with the on-device AI processing, something that Samsung had also announced when its Galaxy AI tech was introduced in January with the Galaxy S24 series.

Having said that, on-device AI means you are expecting the iPhone’s hardware to handle the bulk of the AI work, which might not be ideal, when most AI resources need heavy GPU and NPU processing power that can be sourced through the cloud servers.

So, when reports claim that Apple is talking to both Google and OpenAI to see if their AI models can be used to integrate some on-cloud Generative AI features for iPhone users, you see where the company is going with its supposed partnership.

Apple is likely to rely on either of these companies to bring image and text generation tools for iPhones, something that the company might be finding it hard to pull off with its on-device AI architecture.

Another interesting bit about Apple’s AI impetus could be that most of the AI capabilities are exclusive for the iPhone 16 Pro variants, thanks to the upcoming A18 Pro chipset, which means the vanilla iPhone 16 and 16 Plus miss out on another set of premium features.