Apple AI still won't be a "surprise" at next week's WWDC

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple is caught in an awkward game of delay in the tech giants' fierce battle for AI leadership. Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), which kicks off next Monday (June 9), may or may not reverse that situation. According to a new report from Bloomberg, Apple insiders are prepared for a "disappointing" AI showcase at the conference, while outside observers are concerned that the event could make Apple's shortcomings in the AI space even more obvious. Reports indicate that the most important AI announcement at WWDC will be Apple opening up its Foundation Models to third-party developers. The move will allow app developers to utilize the company's device-side technology currently used to handle lightweight tasks like text summarization. But its large-scale language model has about 3 billion parameters (a measure of its complexity and learning capacity), far less than OpenAI or even Apple's own cloud-based models used for its on-premises cloud-based AI capabilities.