Apple CEO Tim Cook announced a series of generative AI products and services on Monday during his keynote speech at the company’s annual developer conference, WWDC, including “Apple Intelligence” and a deal with OpenAI, ChatGPT maker.
The new tools mark a major shift toward AI for Apple, which has seen a slowdown in global sales over the past year and integrated fewer AI features into its consumer-facing products than its competitors.
“AI has to understand you and be based on your personal context, such as your routine, your relationships, your communications and more. It is beyond artificial intelligence. “It’s personal intelligence,” Cook said. “Introducing… Apple Intelligence.”
Apple’s new AI system includes a range of generative AI tools aimed at creating an automated and personalized experience on your devices. The demo showed that the company’s AI would be integrated into all the operating systems of its Mac laptops, iPad tablets and iPhones, as well as being able to extract information and take action within the applications.
The company also confirmed its long-awaited partnership with OpenAI during the keynote, announcing that Apple would integrate ChatGPT technology into the responses of a new version of its Siri voice assistant. Executives promised it would offer a “more natural, more contextually relevant and more personal” experience. The new Siri will be able to function as an AI chatbot and receive written instructions, and will also have the ability to perform actions within applications based on voice prompts. Apple promised that Siri could review your emails, text messages and photos to find specific information based on relevant context.
An Apple executive demonstrated that the company’s AI could, for example, select the word “daughter” from an email and match it to the corresponding phone contact. Apple Intelligence also has the ability to summarize notifications, emails, and text messages. According to the demo, a group chat that involves planning a trip could be reduced to a single message conveying who booked a hotel and when to arrive. Meanwhile, a new image generation tool allows users to create unique emoji reactions, while the new Image Playground feature can create more complex images in several different styles.
The company also announced an updated operating system for its Vision Pro headset. The virtual reality device, which has only been available in the US since its launch in February, will be available in China, Japan, Singapore, Australia, Canada, France and the United Kingdom in the next two months.
Apple said it would adopt Rich Communication Services to improve messaging between iPhones and other smartphones, as well as expand personalization options for iMessage. Phones running Google’s Android operating system have long used the messaging protocol. More incremental WWDC updates included a redesigned Photos app, walking maps in Apple Maps, adjustments to the Wallet app, personalization options for texting and satellite texting in locations without cell tower connections.
Apple Intelligence: game changer or late arrival to the game?
While the rise of generative AI in recent years has led tech giants like Google to revamp their core services, Apple had until now refrained from incorporating the technology into its flagship products. The company’s lack of generative AI tools has been a constant source of consternation among analysts and investors over the past year, as they expressed concern that Apple appeared to be playing catch-up in the AI race.
As pressure grew on Apple to deliver some sort of new AI offering, the company began exploring partnerships and looking for ways to update tools like Siriits voice assistant that debuted in 2011. After Cook promised shareholders last month that Apple was making “significant investments” in artificial intelligence, Bloomberg reported that the company was finalizing an agreement with OpenAI to integrate the startup’s technology into its devices.
Apple shares have rallied in recent months as investors waited to see what the company would reveal. Apple has struggled this year with weakening global demand for its iPhone, and reported another overall decline in revenue during an earnings conference call last month. A US antitrust lawsuit, a canceled electric vehicle project and a lack of public fanfare for the expensive Vision Pro have also dogged the company.
Meanwhile, other technology companies have seen their stock market value rise by emphasizing investments in artificial intelligence, and Apple rival Microsoft beat analyst expectations this year as its revenue and price grew. of his actions. Artificial intelligence chip maker Nvidia hit a stock market valuation of $3 trillion last week, overtaking Apple to become the world’s second most valuable public company.
Although Apple has been reluctant to debut a marquee AI product, it has been quietly developing its AI capabilities and investments for years. It has acquired several AI startups, reassigned employees to work on artificial intelligence, and is creation of an AI research laboratory in Zurich.
Apple’s hesitation to enter the AI game may have been influenced by a desire to keep its brand focused on privacy. Because AI relies on collecting large amounts of data to train language learning models, the company’s partnership with OpenAI raised privacy concerns from some critics, including Elon Musk, who fixed Apple devices will be “banned from the premises” of their companies for privacy reasons if the ChatGPT integration is released.
However, in a press conference after the event, Cook told reporters that Apple plans to usher in a “new standard for privacy in AI.” The company will publish a document the same day as the keynote highlighting how it will “apply this technology responsibly,” he added. Throughout that day’s rally, executives emphasized measures Apple had taken to protect users’ privacy when using the company’s AI, such as a dedicated set of servers that would power functions but not store personal information. of users or responses on the device.
In an onstage discussion, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, said the company built most of its “Apple intelligence” offerings with its own technology and proprietary fundamental models. In other words, the ChatGPT partnership mainly extends to the search function and improved writing tools, while the bulk of the artificial intelligence tools were created by Apple itself. Users will need to explicitly opt-in before interacting with external AI models, such as those offered by OpenAI.
“For artificial intelligence to be truly useful, it has to focus on you,” Federighi said. “(For) that to be possible, it must be integrated into the experience all the time; it must be informed by context and knowledge of you. And if you’re going to do that, there’s a big responsibility to protect your privacy.”
Other Apple privacy measures include a new hybrid cloud system called “private cloud computing”. The company said it aims to complete most of the processing by AI tools on the device, but will provide additional privacy measures for more complex computing that requires the cloud.
Despite these assurances, the pressure on Apple to offer AI-powered services means the company has had to make some “difficult decisions” around its “longstanding focus on privacy and security,” Ben said. Wood, chief analyst and CMO of CCS Perspective.
“Implementing a cloud-based AI solution is a fascinating tension that leads Apple to reach the same conclusion as rivals like Google: that it is not possible to fully execute current AI functions on the device and that those elements must be outsourced to Cloud. “Apple will try to highlight its security credentials, but this marks a change in focus anyway.”
