{"id":213590,"date":"2025-09-09T19:24:14","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:24:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/213590\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T19:24:14","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T19:24:14","slug":"apple-barely-talked-about-ai-at-its-big-iphone-17-event","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/213590\/","title":{"rendered":"Apple barely talked about AI at its big iPhone 17 event"},"content":{"rendered":"

Apple\u2019s hotly-anticipated Apple event was chock-full of news about updates to AirPods, the Apple Watch, the new suite of iPhones, and more. But during the one-hour-and-fifteen-minute presentation<\/a>, which was considerably shorter than usual, there was one notable buzzword missing from a good chunk of the fanfare: AI.<\/p>\n

Although CEO Tim Cook said during the livestream that the company was \u201ctaking the biggest leap ever for iPhone,\u201d there were only cursory mentions of Apple Intelligence during the new iPhone unveiling.<\/p>\n

Yes, the phones represent \u201cadvancements in Apple silicon, hardware, and software,\u201d per Apple, meaning they\u2019re better for gaming, photos, speed, battery life, and more. But most of the specific, consumer-facing AI tools Apple touted \u2014 like visual intelligence features<\/a> and live translation<\/a> in iMessage and FaceTime \u2014 were big talking points back in June during WWDC 2025. And they\u2019re also not necessarily novel, in that Apple competitors, such as Google and Samsung, introduced comparable features a year ago or more.<\/p>\n

The presentation was a far cry from Apple\u2019s heavy-handed mentions of AI at the iPhone 16 unveiling, which led to public disappointment when some flagship features<\/a> didn\u2019t roll out as promised.<\/p>\n

This year, Apple talked more about how AI is helping power features in the background, and less about how it\u2019s putting AI in front of consumers\u2019 faces \u2014 unlike Google\u2019s Pixel 10 unveiling last month<\/a> and Samsung\u2019s event in January<\/a>. Apple is too behind on its agentic AI efforts to make assistant tools front-and-center in the same way, so it focused a lot of this event on hardware and how AI helps power things behind the scenes.<\/p>\n

Executives talked about how an updated neural engine powers Apple Intelligence, and how local large language models power better game play at higher frame rates. They mentioned how Apple was now building neural accelerators into each GPU core in order to provide \u201cMacBook Pro-levels of compute in an iPhone,\u201d making intense AI workloads possible.<\/p>\n

But when mentioning how AI relates to its new AirPods, Apple leaned heavily on live translation and heart rate monitoring instead of taking Google\u2019s approach with the new budget Pixel Buds 2A, where it discussed how they can be used to speak with Gemini AI. Executives mentioned how the devices\u2019 advanced computational model combines with Apple Intelligence models running on iPhone to power live translation, and for heart rate sensors, they highlighted machine learning algorithms\u2019 role in powering an on-device AI model for activity and calorie tracking, thanks to more than 50 million hours of training data from more than 250,000 participants in an Apple study.<\/p>\n

The mentions of AI in the new Apple Watch presentation felt just as harried. Executives highlighted how Apple\u2019s machine learning algorithms analyze, over 30-day periods, how users\u2019 blood pressure responds to heartbeats. It\u2019s thanks to a series of studies totaling more than 100,000 participants, and Dr. Sumbul Desai, Apple\u2019s VP of health, said the company hopes to \u201cnotify over one million people with undiagnosed hypertension in the first year alone\u201d and expects FDA clearance soon.<\/p>\n

The AI arms race has never been more high-stakes for the companies vying for top spot \u2014 in part because they\u2019ve invested so much in their AI efforts, and those efforts don\u2019t come cheap. OpenAI was valued at $300 billion this year and reportedly<\/a> expects to burn $115 billion through 2029. Anthropic recently<\/a> raised $13 billion at a $183 billion post-money valuation. In the past few months alone, Meta has spent billions of dollars<\/a> hiring top industry researchers after a more than $14 billion<\/a> investment in Scale AI. And that\u2019s just to name a few.
Apple has long been criticized for falling behind in the AI race. Part of that has been reflected in at least 10 reported exits<\/a> from its AI research department recently, including four last week<\/a>. Its lead for robotics research, Jian Zhang, reportedly departed for Meta, and three other AI researchers reportedly left Apple\u2019s foundation models team, with two going to OpenAI and one to Anthropic.<\/p>\n

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