SAN FRANCISCO — Apple unveiled a bevy of new iPads on Tuesday, playing up the new tablets’ potential for artificial-intelligence features as it races to catch up with rivals in the AI race.

The Cupertino, Calif., company said a new M4 chipset used in its Pro models contains a more powerful “neural engine” to drive features in third-party apps and its own software that rely on AI and machine learning. These engines have been part of Apple’s chips since 2017 but have grown considerably more powerful since then, the company said. Tim Millet, the company’s vice president of platform architecture, claimed the M4’s neural engine is capable of performing 38 trillion operations per second, more than doubling operations per second compared with the base-level M3 chipset found in the company’s MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and iMac.