Apple to Hold In-Person Annual 'AI Summit' for Employees at Steve Jobs Theater

Apple will hold its annual AI summit for employees next week at Steve Jobs Theater, the first fully live in-person event at the company's Apple Park headquarters since the pre-COVID era.

The summit is similar to Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference, but for employees only, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, who shared news of the scheduled event in a tweet.

As well as inviting staff to the Steve Jobs Theater, the in-person summit will also be live-streamed to employees unable to attend, similar to the way the company held public product announcement events before the pandemic hit.

The last fully live, fully in-person product event was for the ‌iPhone‌ 11, which was held on Tuesday, September 10, 2019. Whether the AI summit is a sign that future product events will finally return in their traditional guise is now the question on many people's lips.

Apple invited a limited number of developers to attend WWDC 2022 at Apple Park, but the event itself was pre-recorded, with no in-person presenters to showcase Apple's latest creations. Members of the media were also invited to the iPhone 14 unveiling this past September, but that keynote was pre-recorded, too.

Google is adding the technology behind Bard to the Google search engine to enable complex queries to be distilled into digestible answers, and Microsoft is expected to follow a similar path by integrating ChatGPT into Bing Search.