Apple’s AI event – more marketing than tech.

Apple’s AI event was mostly a team-building exercise 🙁

Apple’s in-person summit on AI was lackluster. Most invited were disappointed, report claims, with it being more an excuse for teams to get together rather than to offer any real announcement or tech.

February’s AI summit was the first time in years that Apple held a mass gathering of its kind at its Apple Park campus, rather than as a virtual-only event. However, while the event could’ve been an opportunity for Apple to regain focus away from others such as Microsoft and OpenAI or Google’s “Bard,” it was a big fail.

Indeed, it seems that the event was only a reason to get people together and to gradually nudge them in the same direction, and push out the marketing BS, rather than one that could’ve provided meaningful technological change.

According to Mark Gurman’s “Power On” newsletter for Bloomberg, the summit did have some limited discussions about machine learning and AI. A brochure for the event had Apple’s AI head commenting “machine learning is moving faster than ever, and the talent we have here is truly at the forefront.”

But no one there heard of anything interesting coming out of the summit. Not even for the AI-starving average non-technical average Apple-consumers out there.

With ChatGPT and Google Bard capturing headlines, Apple could’ve used the event to internally show off what its employees have come up with. But, it didn’t, and this underlines the view that Apple has a really hard time attracting talent, due to its closed-shop nature and “secrecy” and strict NDAs.

While the event seemingly didn’t make any serious waves on the AI front, it does at least show Apple is working to hold in-person events again following a hiatus of a few years.

As it combined live attendance with streams to employees who couldn’t make the trip, it seems that all of the main event-related systems were given a thorough shakedown, meaning other events could easily be held this way down the road.