Apple faces a significant AI disadvantage due to limited infrastructure, delayed investments, and reliance on rivals like Google for AI resources. Meanwhile, competitors like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon lead with robust AI ecosystems, cloud infrastructure, and advanced models.

Apple is allegedly at a disadvantage in the AI space, even though IT behemoths like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are making quick progress in this area. According to a recent analysis, the iPhone manufacturer lacks the necessary infrastructure and sustained investment in fundamental AI technologies that its rivals have spent years, if not decades, creating, despite its efforts to advance AI programs.

For instance, Apple postponed its intended redesign of Siri earlier this year because the update, which was supposed to bring Siri into the age of generative AI, wasn’t yet complete. According to a Business Insider story, Apple could have to create essential AI components from scratch if it hopes to modernise Siri to the level of its rivals. This would be costly and time-consuming, and it might take years. If not, it might have to rely more on rivals or buy out start-ups in bulk to catch up.

Google’s decades-long head start in AI technology

Certain AI building elements are necessary for the creation of a successful AI product. While Microsoft and Amazon have some of the fundamental AI building blocks in place, Google already has almost all of them. Google can introduce AI consumer tools like Veo, Flow, and Imagen because it owns the deep stack of technologies that underpin its AI building blocks, including data, chips, data centres, cloud businesses, and ways to distribute the goods.

Transformer, the ground-breaking architecture underlying contemporary generative AI, was created by Google in 2017. Since their introduction in 2016, Google’s AI processors, known as Tensor Processing Units (TPUs), have become essential components of both Google products and third-party developers’ use of Google Cloud.

Decades of data collection and online indexing are also advantageous to Google. In order to make these tools available to clients, the company uses data centres, a cloud business, and a massive dataset to train its potent AI models.

How Amazon and Microsoft are thriving in this space while Apple is not

Some of these foundational components, such as cloud infrastructure, AI models, specialised AI teams developing the technology, and even relationships, are shared by Amazon and Microsoft. In contrast, Apple does not have this kind of infrastructure or access, and it lacks many of these resources.

Apple still depends on Google data centres for services like iCloud backups since it does not have enough large-scale data centres of its own. Apple even asked to use Google’s TPUs for recent AI training, thereby stealing infrastructure from a direct competitor.

According to reports, Apple is lagging behind Google by almost seven years in the development of AI chips for data centres. Despite having access to vast amounts of data from its devices, Apple has been cautious about using such data for AI training because of its privacy-first principles. Its capacity to create and improve large-scale models is thus limited.  Additionally, according to the report, Apple has fallen behind in terms of attracting and keeping elite AI talent.

How may this be a risk to Apple

Apple’s delayed investment in AI infrastructure may become a major issue if generative AI ends up changing how people use computers, including laptops and smartphones. Apple is still putting the fundamentals together, while other tech behemoths are introducing complete, powerful AI systems.