The successful AI products behind Apple’s $3 trillion valuation Posted on : Jan 06 - 2022

The technology boom amidst the pandemic has already hit 2022, creating another record with Apple. This week, the company was valued at $3 trillion, the first US company to reach this growth. This follows Apple’s tremendous market growth that has risen by 38% since the start of 2021 and tripled in value in under four years. The Guardian estimated the valuation is equivalent to the combined value of Boeing, Coca-Cola, Disney, Exxon-Mobil, McDonald’s, Netflix and Walmart. While the growth has not been sustained, the company has surely been a disruptor in the technology market with their breakthrough innovations for decades. This article looks at the AI/ML innovation that makes Apple stand out and possibly stimulated its $3 trillion valuations.

Since 1984 and the release of The Macintosh with the Graphical User Interface, followed by the Apple II, Apple was already creating the first products to earn market value. Following this, Apple has always adopted a quieter and smarter approach towards AI.

Apple stands out compared to other tech companies, given its family of proprietary softwares, i.e., the iOS operating system in-built with Safari, Maps, Photos, iMessage, FaceTime and more, can be connected through its several mobile phones, laptops, television and desktop products. But Apple’s services go beyond these to create the ‘Apple Brain’ that leverages AI, ML, deep learning and neural networks to provide you with the smart tech you didn’t even know you needed. As Verge termed it, Apple is about the ‘small conveniences’.

Siri: a household virtual assistant

Apple launched Siri in 2011 when the concept of a virtual assistant on a smartphone was barely known, making it the first widely used AI and NLP powered assistant. Microsoft and Google introduced Cortana some three years after Siri was introduced. Siri allows iPhone, Mac, and iPad users to connect with their devices without even lifting a finger and completing their basic online chores. While Siri has been criticised for its lack of advancement, as compared to AIs7, it can do many impressive tasks, including translating, telling you the weather, setting your alarm, finding answers to questions of Google, narrating a bedtime story, helping you with directions while car parking, playing music, making restaurant reservations and more. In fact, the assistant can translate between 40 pairs of languages in real-time.

Siri’s NLP functions link back to Apple’s cloud, but according to the company, user privacy is preserved. Apple has been researching to improve Siri’s localised results by training it with local datasets of places and businesses’ names. This would allow a resident to, as Bernard Marr illustrated, say, “I’m going to Kilkenny”, and Siri will understand Kilkenny being a town in Ireland over the resident murdering a man named Kenny. In addition, with its acquisition of Xnor.ai’s 15x faster edge AI, Apple allows Siri to work offline.  View more