We’re into Summer 2024 and there’s been some more AI news, coming from the usual players in the AI field.
At WWDC 2024, Apple announced their own AI – Apple Intelligence – which will bring lots of AI features to the Apple ecosystem, including devices and computers. They officially say that Apple Intelligence is ‘the personal intelligence system that puts powerful generative models at the core of iPhone, iPad, and Mac’. It will be included in iOS 18, iPadOS 18 and MacOS Sequoia, although I wouldn’t expect it to be included in the very first iOS 18 versions, I assume lots of development and testing work yet for their AI.
Near the end of July, OpenAI announced SearchGPT – their AI-powered search engine. This sounds somewhat like Perplexity AI, which I highly recommend from all the current AI apps and interfaces, so will be interesting to see what’s in SearchGPT and how it measures up to Perplexity AI. SearchGPT is currently on a waitlist, though there seems to be extensions for Chrome and Edge already available at https://searchgpt.me
Anthropic’s Claude AI is now available on iOS and iPadOS, as well as on Android. I’m not 100% sure, but I might add the Claude iOS app to my ‘Testing the AI Chatbots‘ feature, which included those major AI chatbots which then had iOS apps and a free version – it included Perplexity AI, OpenAI ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Google Gemini (tested via Chrome browser as a special concession)
And this week, Microsoft said ‘Microsoft Bing adds better version of Google’s AI Overview‘ – so this is Bing’s own AI overview being added to their search results. I’ve noticed some users already complaining that this has caused a complete change to the Bing results page, where the usual results links have been shifted around and with AI overview then taking centre stage. I did have a couple of test searches on Bing and the results are a bit of a mess – Wikipedia or eBay or some other large site at the top, then actual links below that and then on the right various other results and links into various sites – all looks a bit jumbled and hard to make out the important info.
My take on all the above is that it will be interesting to try them all out, especially as in most cases you can try them all out for free, when they’re available. I especially like the fact that Apple’s AI features are said to be available on Macs with Silicon processors, from M1 upwards, so you don’t necessarily have to buy the next iPhone to try it out (if you’ve got a relevant M1+ Mac of course) I assume the tip top Apple AI features might only be available on Pro versions of their new iPhones, but let’s see what happens.