Apple at NeurIPS: Why it matters

Apple’s decision to take part in (and co-sponsor) this year’s NeurIPS conference shows how the company is keeping close tabs on future trends in the field, highlights its willingness to cooperate, and shows Apple reaching out to recruit new expertise. 

The company’s machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) teams are deeply involved in the important event. Since Apple is a co-sponsor, its people will be at its booth to talk about the company’s research and will present several research papers at the show.

As described on the company’s Machine Learning website, the papers include research on more efficient image generation, protecting privacy in AI, and cutting-edge work on Large Reasoning Models (LRMs). You can explore all the presentations from the big-name attendees anticipated at NeurIPS via this interactive graphic.

NeurIPS is important

NeurIPS is considered to be the most prestigious and influential AI conference in the field. The world’s leading researchers and practitioners converge on the show to discuss their cutting-edge research. 

That also means the trends that emerge at the event tend to leak into wider discourse 12 to 24 months later. In 2023 and 2024, for example, conversations tended to converge around responsible AI, scaling, and efficiency — involving both hardware and software advances. Apple was clearly paying attention, and the current M5 processors inside some new Macs offer the kind of efficiency and hardware acceleration required for AI. 

In 2024, some of the big conversations related to Edge AI, AI-optimized hardware design, privacy-preservation in AI and the democratization of AI through open-source.

This year’s trends seem to be coalescing around hardware design, energy efficiency, quantum computing, contextual awareness, and data efficiency — coupled with more conversation on use of AI in specialized domains, including health, finance, robotics, and sustainable resource management. Many of those trends are already very much in the wider public conversation, reflecting growing public understanding of AI. 

Where is Apple?

Where is Apple in this? Apple plans to introduce its take on contextual AI in Siri next year. Speaking last month, Apple CEO Tim Cook said on this: “We’re also excited for a more personalized Siri. We’re making good progress on it, and as we’ve shared, we expect to release it next year.” 

Apple has also been working very hard (and very secretively) to develop its own AI-augmented digital health services, which might also make their debut in the coming year. These will evidently have a preventive health element as evidenced by the decision to move management of Apple Fitness+ under Apple’s vice president of health, Sumbul Desai, earlier this year. (“Our goal is to empower people to take charge of their own health journey,” said Desai in 2023). Apple’s Private Cloud Compute nails the cloud-based AI service option. 

It is also true that with its focus on hardware, software, and processor innovation, Apple now offers the best available tools for AI research, including tools for Edge AI. (You can test the ability of your Apple device to deliver AI at the edge today, using an app called Locally AI (for Mac, iPhone, or iPad). Thanks to the power of Apple Silicon, Locally lets you use private, on-device, edge LLMs right now.)

What if the company has been misconstrued?

Examples like these show how much Apple is already doing concerning the evolution of AI. It’s a huge field, of course, with different approaches. 

I’d argue that Apple’s strategic approach was to focus on specific use cases (think agentic AI, machine learning), and application of the technology in specific domains, rather than a catch-all LLM system, like ChatGPT. History indicates that strategic decision allowed the company to fall behind, but has it really?

Once you consider the wider industry conversations around applied AI coming out of NeurIPS in recent years, much of what Apple is actually delivering reflects a very strong response to the industry needs discussed and identified there. 

If hardware can be seen as the AI fundamentals, then the innate advantages of neural intelligence on Apple Silicon suggest it now has strong foundations in place, particularly around privacy, hardware, and edge AI. 

We shall now find out the extent to which Apple, its researchers, and the wider AI industry, can exploit the foundations Apple has laid.

You can follow me on social media! Join me on BlueSky,  LinkedIn, and Mastodon.