Apple is reportedly working on its next-gen M4 custom silicon, with plans to make artificial intelligence a key part of its design.

Despite jumping to an early lead with Siri, Apple quickly fell behind in the realm of virtual assistants and the development of AI. The company has been working to catch up, with reports indicating the company’s ReALM AI venture is poised to surpass the venerable ChatGPT. Apple’s AI efforts have received a boost from the company, which has shuttered its work on the Apple Car—codenamed Project Titan—and reassigned many of the engineers to its AI teams.

Read More: Apple Unveils Groundbreaking AI Breakthrough That Beats ChatGPT: The Realm of Contextual Understanding

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, Apple’s next generation custom silicon designed to focus on the company’s AI abilities. As WPN pointed out in our coverage of ReALM AI, Apple’s AI model will reportedly bring interesting capabilities that are uniquely suited to its M-Series chips.

At the heart of ReALM’s capabilities lies its ability to bridge the gap between disparate data inputs, seamlessly integrating text, images, and other forms of data into a cohesive framework. Experts speculate this could pave the way for unprecedented advancements in natural language processing and image recognition – areas where Apple has traditionally lagged behind its rivals.

However, what truly sets ReALM apart is its purported image generation and animation capabilities. If reports are believed, Apple’s Photos app could soon become a playground for users, offering intuitive tools for editing, enhancing, and animating visual content with unparalleled ease.

Moreover, ReALM’s integration with Siri, Apple’s voice-activated virtual assistant, could herald a new era of personalized AI experiences. By leveraging its language processing capabilities, ReALM promises to imbue Siri with a deeper understanding of context and intent, enabling more natural and intuitive user interactions.

Apple has faced unique challenges in the AI space, largely as a result of its pro-privacy stance. Training AI models requires gargantuan quantities of data and is largely done in the cloud. In contrast, Apple is one of the few companies that makes an effort to protect user privacy, opting to do as much as it can on-device, rather than sending user data to the cloud.

While this approach is good from a privacy standpoint, it does leave the company at a disadvantage when compared to OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google, all of which have no compunction about relying heavily on the cloud and don’t share Apple’s privacy-first focus.

Hopefully, the new M4 and ReALM AI will provide the combination necessary to help Apple compete in the AI space in a way that continues to put user privacy front and center.