Increasing adoption

Electronic devices will be increasingly driven by AI

Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook’s statement that Apple is going to embed OpenAI’s ChatGPT into future iterations of iOS has sparked off a new “tech war”. It has focused the spotlight on an ongoing competition to present artificial intelligence (AI) for mass consumption. Elon Musk, who has launched a rival generative AI chatbot, Grok, for public consumption through his new company, xAI, has threatened to ban the use of any Apple products on the premises of his multiple businesses (Tesla, X, Boring Co, xAI, and SpaceX among others) for fear of “security violations”. Meanwhile, a major Apple rival, consumer electronics giant Samsung, has already boasted the launch of AI-embedded functions in its new series of handsets. Indeed, there are rumours that Mr Musk and Samsung may be in talks on collaboration on the AI front to make a new phone. Mr Musk has said that he’s worried OpenAI can suction off the data and breach privacy on Apple devices, but sceptics would suspect his outburst against the Apple-OpenAI collaboration is partly driven by rivalry, and partly by the fact that he has a complicated on-again, off-again dispute with OpenAI (where he was a co-founder).
 

Be that as it may, AI chatbots and large language models (LLMs), and features and apps built upon such platforms are witnessing increasing adoption. Every tech major is looking for ways to integrate AI into their respective offers. This trend promises to change many aspects of digital markets. Operating systems that incorporate AI and search engines, which use AI in some fashion, are just two of the many sectors where LLMs are going to be commonplace soon. Google has incorporated its AI, Gemini, into its search engine, although users have had mixed responses to the changes in the current experience. Bing from Microsoft has also embedded AI. Niche service providers like Perplexity have successfully built “wrappers” that take search engine results, curate them for accuracy, and build in AI prompts using ChatGPT, or other LLMs, to offer natural language results. Alexa is currently working on embedding AI as well.
 

Apple and Samsung together hold over a 50 per cent market share in mobile devices and tablets. Google has over a 90 per cent market share in global search while Bing has 4 per cent, and Windows has a 69 per cent market share in personal computer (PC) operating systems. The next generation of mobiles, PCs, home security systems, smart fridges, home theatres, and other devices are all likely to have AI embedded, along with Internet of Things (IoT) devices, to improve operating efficiency, and offer a smooth interface to the user. It is likely that voice-activated devices driven by AI will soon become the norm across the consumer electronics industry. Such devices would also be largely capable of self-diagnosis, apart from customising user experience. This would indeed mean paradigm shifts in security, and the need to set new standards in data privacy. For one thing, voice-activated systems can be broken by AI, which can mimic voices flawlessly. Also AI-driven devices with IoT would be streaming data out to many different service providers continuously. Creating and enforcing new laws to keep such data private would present new challenges. However, the world inevitably is headed to some version of this AI-driven future and it will present the potential of increased productivity and convenience. It is to be hoped that the pros outweigh the cons.